In your photography and writing, one of your main themes is to explore the “borders of monotheism.” What does that mean?

I often focus on Judaism, Christianity (mainly Eastern Christianity) and Islam, to explore areas where the sacred crosses borders. I show the similarities between different religions and dogmas. This exploration naturally transfers into mysticism, where the borders are less definite. I like to show, for example, the common threads between Sufism (a Muslim sect) and Hasidism (a Jewish sect). They have the same concentration of energy, the same passion to explore meditation and prayer.

I also like to show the places where people of different religions — for example Egypt — frequent the same holy places. We are much more accustomed to seeing the conflicts, the violence, the extremism — and we don’t see the common ground that exists. For me, it’s important to explore these places and to show them to the world.

But my interest is really in the human beings themselves, in exploring human relationships, and in covering underreported topics. I also work a lot on nomadism, or rather the end of nomadism, and the problems nomads face. I work with the Gypsies in Europe, publishing a lot about the problems they are having in Eastern Europe and Italy. I also cover nomads in Afghanistan and Tibet.

I’m in the final stages of this project in Central Asia, which focuses mainly on the Afghani diaspora. Next month I’ll work in Pakistan, photographing people living in the Northwest part of the country, focusing especially on the symbolism light has in mysticism. I’m preparing two books: one about Afghanistan specifically, and one about the borders of monotheism, entitled Auras.

I just came back from Tibet, for a new project I will continue to work on over the next three years or so. This work will have the same kind of sensibility and the same interests as my other work — the relationship of people to sacred geography and spaces. It also looks at pre-Buddhist traditions and also some Tantric traditions, which are very sensitive and sensual. Instead of refusing the body, they exalt the body, and they exalt the space, materials, and ground around them.

You often photograph and interview people in conflict zones. Why do you choose to do your work in these places?

I use conflict zones not because of the conflict itself — I’m not interested in the wars. I hate war. I go because I want to learn about the people behind the scenes of war we see in the media. I want to share their life and to see with their eyes what is happening around them. I try to narrate it in my report and in books. I also go because we in the rest of the world are really victims of the stereotypes, of the propaganda we see in the news.

It’s very important to show the hope and the hopelessness of these people. After 10 years, there is a big prospect the Taliban will come back to Afghanistan. What will happen to women in this country? These women are very strong, but they are not free. It is very difficult for them.

I’m going to Pakistan for similar reasons. We forget about this country completely. We see them in the news sometimes during an emergency for a short period, but afterwards they disappear. For example, in Pakistan, during the 10 years of the Afghani war, 30,000 people died because of the violence. Yet this is a completely forgotten war. There are other countries like this, but I’m not able to cover them all in one lifetime.

When you travel in these countries, alone, as a woman, are you afraid?

I don’t know … sometimes, yes. But people fill me with hope, and they tend to be very helpful. Because I travel alone, and people see my fragility and my sincerity, they want to help. The guest is sacred in Islam. When I arrive in an Islamic country, it is a strange situation, because I am both a stranger and a woman. I also am a married woman, and I have children. So this situation generates a very great respect for me. It provides a protection. I live under this kind of sacred respect reserved for the guest. It’s the greatest in the world, I think.

Sometimes I meet people who believe that women should not travel alone. But I put these experiences out of my mind — it’s a very marginal experience.

Especially in Afghanistan, I’m humbled by the people’s generosity. Theirs is far greater than mine. For example, I once had an appointment there with someone I did not know very well. This person arrived to our appointment and brought his whole family — his own children — to protect me. I didn’t know what to do. I cried, I refused to accept it, but they obligated me to accept this kind of protection. This type of thing is sometimes too much for me. They are very fantastic people, so beautiful, so full of humor, full of vitality, and love for life. This country is so marred by war, yet there’s a sense of life and generosity from the people that’s unparalleled.

What are your favorite ways to share the stories of people you meet?

I use what is a kind of photography and literary report. I have the privilege to narrate in two modes: both with photography and with writing. They help each other a lot. Because publishers are used to separating these two modes, it’s very difficult to publish a book with this kind of narration. But I love to mix them, and I think it is very important to do so. It can be very helpful to understand the reality of the situation.

I also collect a lot of audio recordings when I’m traveling. I have recorded many voices, music, songs, prayers, the sounds of the street, of insects, of children, of the night. I include the audio recordings in my exhibitions as well.

What first inspired you on this path of researching and reporting on underreported people?

Growing up in Poland, my family was Catholic, part of the majority religion. I learned at a young age that my country had held the worst genocide in history. When I was very young, 12 years old at most, I started to collect all kinds of information about it. I asked my grandmother, “Grandmother, what happened here? Who are the Jews?” She didn’t answer. So I studied books and Jewish culture. I was a little obsessed with it. I wanted to learn as much as possible, but I shuddered to understand what had happened.

My work started this way, and after that I studied it at university. I started to explore the minority scene in Eastern Europe. I studied both ethnic and religious minorities — Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and others. I wanted to cover stories of minorities that suffered not only during, but after World War II. Many were deported after the war in order to make them disappear. Their culture was completely destroyed by the Communist government.

I later moved to Italy. In the Polish literary tradition, it is very common for writers and poets to go out of the country to write about us. Though I moved to Italy for personal reasons, leaving Poland permitted me to see my country from a distance, and permitted me to write about my country, which might not have been so easy to do from my homeland.

For a time, you were an avid participant in a unique kind of street theater.

Yes, I love theater. I developed an experimental street performance, a mix of acrobatics and Oriental martial arts, where we danced on stilts. We performed in theaters, and festivals, and on the street. It was choreographed, but also improvisation, with dialogue and music to narrate a story.

It was theater but in big open spaces, using the very beautiful and very rich scenography of the cities: old houses, natural light, fountains, rivers …. It was wandering theater. We moved from one place to another, and the whole group of people followed us. Sometimes my three sons performed with us. I loved it so much, but I found I didn’t have time to do both theater and my other work.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on theCase Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Follow your passion with discipline, and without too much compromise. Study all the possible techniques to develop and grow. I was very fortunate to have the opportunities I did — maybe other people don’t have the same chances I had.

But I tell my children: the most important thing is to follow the small illuminations that we have sometimes in our lives, that give us a kind of security that we are sure what we really want to do. We sometimes forget about it, or we are afraid to realize it. But I think all human beings have a certain predisposition or special talent for certain things.

What was the TED Fellowship experience like for you?

It was a very interesting, amazing experience. It was completely new for me — I am much more used to living in the pastures in Central Asia than in the context TED provides. It was the first time I used the English language not with a Kabul taxi driver: I had only used English as a kind of international language before.

TED was excellent stimulation for the professional part of my work. I received valuable professional advice, particularly on how to develop outside of Italy. But for me the most important thing about the TED Fellowship was meeting with the Fellows and other people and hearing the talks. I loved it so much. It’s really a great global platform.

Your studio explores new ways physical objects relate to digital information. Why is that mission important to you?

The way the human body and human mind are set up, we’re incredibly good at using physical objects and interacting with them. That physical world is so rich, yet it’s often neglected in the traditional ways we interact with computers — such as a keyboard and mouse, or even a touch screen. Whatever you’re doing, it feels the same, whether you’re writing a spreadsheet or a love letter. There’s no extra texture, or smell, or any other sensation, besides the visual element. It would be a shame to just totally ignore those other aspects of the physical world.

That’s why I use new technologies to bring back some of that physicality into the digital world. Sometimes the goal is purely functional, like helping somebody in an office do something faster — the sense of touch gives them this feedback that helps them do things more quickly. Sometimes the outcome is simply to be more fun — a richer experience. I try to integrate ways one can interact with computers that are faster, easier to understand, more social, and more fun. That’s something that’s been pretty difficult to do with computers in the past.

One of my earlier projects, the “Sensetable,” I talk about in my TED Talk. The Sensetable has a circuit built into the tabletop surface, which tracks the movement of objects on the table. My favorite application of it is one where the objects on the table represent different atoms. You can bring them together to cause a “chemical reaction.” That project is now an exhibit at the museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Create a Chemical Reaction exhibit by James Patten at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Installed in March 2010.

Another interesting piece was the Gravity Harp for Bjork. Some colleagues here in my co-working space asked me to help them with the harp, because in order to get it to actually play music, they needed some very complex control of the motion of the instrument. The original design had 37 pendulums in a ring. That ring was 50 feet wide, and 25 feet tall.

We had a really tight production schedule, so ultimately, it was much smaller, but the core idea of pendulums that play a harp remained constant throughout the process.

Testing the Gravity Harp in a warehouse in Brooklyn, May 2011. The Gravity Harp is a robotic instrument for Bjork’s Biophilia tour. Project team: Andy Cavatorta, James Patten, Karl Biewald, Doug Ruuska.

Right now, we’re working on a series of windows for Barney’s New York. We recently had a series of kinetic installations with motors and televisions, commemorating Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue.

Carine’s World installation in the window of Barneys New York by James Patten, September 2011.

Currently we have a display up about a French shoe designer, Christian Louboutin. One of the windows has a man’s pair and a woman’s pair of shoes. The man’s pair sort of chases the woman’s pair around the window. We built this huge mechanism to use magnets underneath the floor to actually move the shoes. These window displays are kind of a crazy combination of technology and art. The people at Barney’s are really exited about having kinetic elements in their windows, and creatively, we see things from the same perspective, so it’s been really fun working with them.

How did you first come across this idea of combining the physical and digital?

I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and I was doing research in a virtual reality lab with Professor Randy Pausch. When people would wear the virtual reality head-mounted displays, they would often experience a phenomenon called “simulator sickness.” It’s kind of like getting seasick. Your eyes are giving your brain conflicting information about what you’re experiencing, compared to what the rest of your body is perceiving. The theory I heard about why this goes on is that your body thinks, “Something really weird is going on here. I must have eaten something bad, so I should throw up.” I felt like that was such a clear signal that this type of interaction was not well suited for the human body.

To help people acclimate, one thing we found worked really well was to give the person something physical to hold in their hand during the virtual reality session. We found they had a much easier time understanding their relationship between the physical and virtual world that way.

For example, we had this one demonstration called the “Light Saber Demo.” In it, the player is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and he or she had to fight with this light saber. We would just give the person a flashlight to hold in their hand, and they would see the image of the saber on the screen. That physical object made it a much more believable story, and people felt much more comfortable.

From that, I got really excited about this idea that physical objects give us this special kind of information that you can’t get visually. Later at a conference, I saw some work out of MIT from a professor named Hiroshi Ishii that just blew me away. He had a table with little building models on top of it, coupled with video projection on the tabletop. There were these physical models, but digital information was projected around them. As soon as I saw that, I asked one of his students, “Who’s your advisor? I need to meet this person!” It was a love at first sight thing. I went to MIT and studied with Professor Ishii, and wound up doing my PhD there.

You mentioned working with Randy Pausch, who is famous for his talk on living life to the fullest. Has his philosophy affected you at all?

Randy was a very dynamic guy, and we were a very tightly knit research group under his leadership. I think that when you’re in that context, there are going to be a lot of influences. Some you notice and some you don’t notice. One of the most important lessons I learned from Randy is that time is very valuable. He has another talk that he used to give often, his time management talk. That’s a theme that is there in both of his well-known talks: time is the most valuable resource we have. At any moment, you have to think, “Out of all the things that I could be doing, is what I’m doing right now the right way to spend my time?”

Being around him really inspired me to do the best I can to make sure the work I’m doing is pushing things in the direction I want to go.

Your work combines design, electronics, software, and requires picking up new skills on the fly. Have you discovered anything surprising about this eclectic type of work?

One surprising thing is how much the skills from different disciplines transfer. For example, before I had ever worked on electronics at all, I would see people working on it onscreen, and think, “Wow, whatever that person is doing, it’s really beautiful.” The software that you use to design electronics is very colorful, because everything is color-coded. People inadvertently create these really beautiful images. And one of the things I realized, once I got better at electronics, is that often a circuit that’s better designed, that does its job better, is actually visually more aesthetically beautiful as well.

I’m always trying to go after projects that involve different kinds of skills, and that leads to unexpected places, like doing these windows for Barney’s. But it keeps things really interesting and fun. When we started this window for Barney’s, we were given these shoes that were $1,000 dollars each, and we had to drill holes in them. I thought, “Wow, I’ve never had to drill a hole in a $1,000 shoe before.” I feel like I’m always getting to do something new. Sometimes I stop and think, “How did I get here?” I’m happy to be here, but it’s certainly not where I thought I would be 10 years ago.

How has the TED Fellowship affected your work?

Being a TED Fellow has given me the opportunity to connect with a lot of people. Some have been face-to-face interactions at the conference, while others have been through the TED website. For example, at the conference I met a variety of people who have offered to help me or collaborate, and the most recent person I hired at Patten Studio learned about my work through TED.

Also, the TED Fellows participated in a pre-conference, which was extremely useful. I learned a lot about how to communicate about my work with the press and with the public.

Finally, it’s also been very valuable to have this group of peers in the TED Fellows. The group is so supportive and people within it have so many different perspectives to offer. There is a lot of trust in the group and a genuine willingness to help each other achieve big goals.

In general, work at my studio has picked up a lot since I was selected as a TED Fellow. We’ve gotten more interesting projects and more of them.

Part of your approach at Patten Studio is to think of the user experience first, and think next of the technology. Doesn’t it often prove impossible to make the technologies match up to the vision?

Well, it’s true that there are lots of technologies that I would love to have that don’t exist. Like the ability to track objects or people in 3D space without using batteries. There are lots of ways to solve problems like that in a limited scope, but there’s no one off-the-shelf solution that solves the problem in the general case.

But a lot of times, if you come up with the user experience that you want to have, and you realize that the technology to do it doesn’t exist, maybe you can create that technology. I think that’s the most exciting outcome, because it’s using technology to expand what’s possible in the world of design.

There’s a list of technologies that people keep generally thinking, “Well, if we had this technology, we could do all these amazing things.” One that people think about a lot is digital clay. It’s the idea that you could have clay that would remember its shape, and then you could program it and get it to do something like transform itself into the shape it had yesterday. These kinds of technologies are really exciting, especially for people who design 3D structures like cars or buildings. No one really has any idea how to make digital clay. But with technologies like these, there are people who recognize that the vision is really exciting, and they start taking baby steps towards that idea. Often, they eventually get somewhere really close that’s useful for a lot of things.

What kind of not-yet-existing technologies are you taking baby steps towards right now?

Well, one idea that I’ve been excited about for a long time is an outgrowth of my Sensetable. I built another similar table that not only tracks the objects, but also moves them. To do this, I used electromagnets, which are too power-hungry for every day use. So I’m working on a more generalized, practical technology to do the same job. I’d like to create a bunch of small objects that you can put on any tabletop, where they can drive themselves around. By moving themselves to different orientations in front of you, they become the user interface: they become the way you interact with the computer.

For example, let’s say you’re editing a video. These knobs would move out onto the table in front of you, and arrange themselves in a way that makes sense for that particular task. Then, if you’re going to draw a picture, they rearrange themselves in another way. You have this constantly evolving palette of tools at your disposal. You can have this kind of give-and-take, tug-of-war interaction with the computer, where, if you’re doing something that you’re not supposed to do, you can sort of feel the computer pulling against you as you push an object on the table.

I’ve made the proof-of-concept of this, in the context of the magnetic array, but I’d like to make this something that you could put in your pocket, and pull out and use on any kind of tabletop surface.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on theCase Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

It’s important to be honest with yourself about what you’re good at and not good at. Team up with other people whose strengths are complimentary, in order to form a well-balanced team. I think that’s one of the most important things. It’s tough to go about starting a business by yourself, and it’s much more fun, and better in a lot of ways, if you can do it as part of a team.

Lars Jan, a TED Fellow, creates multimedia performances that probe the ubiquity of screens and propaganda in our culture. Today, his show ABACUS—billed as “a multimedia talking tour of our hyper-networked world to come”—opens at BAM’s Fisher Fishman Space in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a show delivered by his invented persona, Paul Abacus, about the future of national borders and the workings of contemporary persuasion—with a giant panda appearing overhead on occasion. It’s a show that Jan first gave a sneak peek of back at TEDGlobal 2011. Below, the edited transcript of a conversation we had with Jan about his work at the time.

Tell us more about ABACUS.

I want ABACUS to start a conversation about our relationship to screens and about how, in our culture, propaganda wins over content so much of the time. It’s a very visual, sixty-minute direct address to the audience. One of the big things that ABACUS is about is increasing visual literacy, so that people are better able to discern good content from bad — and truths from fiction or propaganda — more easily.

We performed ABACUS at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, as part of New Frontier, and we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for it as well. We did some public performances on the streets, some choreographed paparazzi, and some impromptu press conferences and choreographed protests, which were also part of the piece.

A lot of your work explores our screen-based culture. How did you become obsessed with this theme?

I think it came on slowly. I am an only child, raised by my mom, and like a lot of kids growing up in America, I watched a lot of television. I was also part of that generation where personal computers first came into the home.

Technology, computing, and screens are completely central to my work. I’m ambivalently obsessed with screens: I love how democratic they are, in the sense that they allow all this information, and intelligent, aesthetic vision to travel the map in no time. At the same time, I’m very curious about screens as they relate to how we gather, and relate to live events.

Ever since cinema was introduced, screens have been kicking the teeth in of live performances. And I think that there’s something that has been a little bit lost because of this. Screens encourage people to stay in, and screens encourage people to look at an object in a public space as opposed to another person. The pendulum is swinging so far in favor of the screen, and it’s going to swing even further. Screens are going to be all over our public and private spaces, mapped onto cars, trees, architecture. Futurists talk about embedding them into contact lenses.

Unfortunately screens have become primarily created in the service of advertising. Executives want television shows to be good so that they can sell the advertising slots for more money. And now the same thing is happening on my cell phone and on the Internet.

I think it’s a really impoverished way of thinking about what’s possible with screen space, and what we could do with it educationally, culturally, and communicatively — in terms of encouraging diversity of aesthetic experiences, but also in terms of encouraging something that is closer to what a true democracy might look like. I think screens could be integral to that. But because of the direction screens are currently heading, I think live events and live gatherings are going to emerge as incredibly important in the next decade.

Above: A trailer for ABACUS, created for the Sundance Film Festival.

In promoting a renaissance of live performance, do you hope to see the prevalence of screens decrease?

It sounds like I’m damning screen culture or something, but I’m not. I love screens. Screens are in my work. Technology is in my work. Our lives have so much to do with that relationship. In the way that you would inoculate somebody with a vaccine by taking in a small amount of the virus into your body, in my work, screens are sort of like the vaccination. I use screens in order to put performers and the audience in relationship to the screen. It enables a very active dialogue that’s not formally about screens, but that somehow makes that relationship resonate with whatever the content is. It allows us to meditate on that very contemporary experience.

There’s a lot that’s happening in our culture right now that the screen-based media is not able to critique, because it’s working at the service of a lot of people who are actually causing the problems. I think working from the artistic and the financial fringe is the only real way to keep a separation between something like advertising or a corporate interest, and real artistic freedom. I believe the live event is a platform for artists to have a much higher level of true conversation within society.

You have a pretty strong stance on the ways you will fund your art. How do you manage to do it?

Well, I lie, cheat and steal. [Laughs]

The problem is, there’s not a single pathway. It’s always an improvisation. Being an artist in this culture, you have to use a tremendous amount of your creativity just to find a way to do your work with integrity. That means producing your work and aligning yourself with institutions, supporters, and festivals that you respect. It’s also about finding a way to bend what I’m interested in to the contexts that are available. It’s about jumping on those opportunities, and looking at them as interesting platforms that I didn’t necessarily conceive of in the first place.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

Anybody focused on increasing the quality of face-to-face human interaction is going to be riding a growing wave in the next couple of decades. Do everything you can to increase true face-to-face encounters and the quality of those interactions — whether it’s investing in community programs or international exchanges, in rethinking public space or public transportation. People are going to be hungry for that social contact, in order to counterbalance our increasingly mediated lives. Leverage that trend. I believe it’s going to be a very profound one, and will apply to a lot of different businesses.

You’ve said that before realizing you were an artist, you dedicated yourself to more conventional ways of working for social causes. When was the moment you realized you were an artist?

I took a directing class in college, and that was the first moment I realized I was able to collage a lot of different things I was interested in. I made a piece in the class where I integrated some short clips of videos from La Dolce Vita, which is one of my favorite movies, some poetry from Paradise Lost, which is one of my favorite works of literature, played with light in the classroom, and I performed a bit myself.

I don’t think I knew what I was doing, but I think I became aware that there was an impulse that was guiding choices I didn’t know why I was making. I think the moment that I realized I could stop making “logical” choices and just make instinctual choices, was when it occurred to me, “Oh, maybe that’s what it means to feel like you are inspired.”

That type of work made me so much happier than writing a paper or constructing an argument with three bullet points. I think what I recognized was that even though I love language and I love ideas, I feel like the way that we structure most of our arguments is far too literal. With my art I am able to express feelings in a way that is both more vague, and simultaneously more specific.

I am working on a dance video installation with Nichole Canuso Dance Company. It’s called “Takes.” It’s a really beautiful dance video installation, very emotionally and visually driven, with no language.

The art lab I direct, Early Morning Opera, also just signed on with a new producer, MAPP International Productions, for a piece that I’m deeply excited about called HOLOSCENES, which is about global rituals. The name is a play on the current geologic epic that we’re in, the Holocene. We’re making a computer program that generates 24 random land-based GPS coordinates, and we’ll research rituals starting as close to those 24 points as possible.

The work is going to be a big outdoor installation in three giant acrylic aquariums. A custom hydraulic system will modulate the level of the water in the aquariums, according to environmental conditions around the world, in real time. It plays on the theme of popular water spectacles — the fountains in front of the Bellagio, for example — but primarily, the piece is about flooding. It’s about global catastrophe, the persistence of human behavior, and habits in the face of larger systems. It’s about our inability to change quickly — something that is both really gorgeous and so frustrating at the same time. (Read more about how Holoscenes is progressing. It was funded via Kickstarter in June of 2014.)

Why is being part of the TED Fellow community important to you?

The thing that’s most exciting to me about the TED Fellowship is communicating and working with creative people. I don’t really care if they are in “artistic fields” or not. The abiding commonality of TED Fellows is that whatever they do — if they’re astronomers or doctors or in some research field — they are just incredibly, hellaciously creative. The TED Fellowship has been the single group that I’ve been most proud to be a part of. They are truly smart, inspiring people.

America into the 20th century was really about specialization, and I think we became overspecialized. That hinders vocabulary exchange. It makes certain things too complicated and opaque for other groups to understand and have a dialogue about. The finance system is a very good example of that. Systems have gotten so byzantine that only a few people know how to navigate them or even talk about them. I love being part of a community where a person like a TED Fellow who’s doing very, very complicated work in biotech, for example, makes it a point to communicate in a compelling way to people who don’t have that expertise.

Above: A look at HOLOSCENES.

Note: This piece was originally published on Nov. 4, 2011. It was updated on September 24, 2014, as ABACUS opened at BAM.

In your TEDtalk, you tell us about the Sunglass Project, the latest software from your company dplay. What is the goal of the Sunglass Project?

The Sunglass Project is a web-based design platform that really democratizes design. It gives access to high-end design tools to people all across the world.

Thirty or 40 years ago, when computer-aided design (CAD) was pioneered, it was done by the manufacturing industry. Architects started using it in the 1970s, and now there’s practically no design that happens without a bit of computation. So some of these metaphors or ways of thinking have remained, while the context has completely changed: we now live in a networked, mobile world, and design itself has become more and more collaborative. But the design systems we use were not developed with this in mind.

So at dplay we wanted to develop a system that responds to this change in context. We thought, “What kind of a system would allow collaborative cooperatation in this networked world?” Immediately we went to a web-based delivery system. You don’t need to download or buy any software: you can get it from the web browser. Sunglass is a drag-and-drop design platform that you can use to share and build 3-D content. We are already working with universities, building up design and analysis tools on the browser, so the moment it is launched, everybody across the world will be able to use these tools. We want to make this a truly democratic space where everybody can join in design. We are planning our first launch for March 2012.

For us, success will be if a student in Bangladesh or India, using their $100 laptop, can access a high-end design tool developed somewhere in Stanford or Princeton.

You have said you are passionate about making platforms for collaborative design. What experiences developed this dedication?

My architecture undergrad studies in Kolkata were very formative for me. It was a very orthodox, dogmatic place, and design was taught as almost rule-based. It was very frustrating.

Since I was very young, computer science was a favorite subject of mine. I simply enjoyed building systems. Early on in my architecture studies I would try to integrate small things like programming buildings and trying algorithmic ways of going about what people would normally do in other ways. It was purely out of personal interest, rather than any idea of where I was headed.

I was lucky because I had this mentor who told me that there are places that focus on integrating design and computation together. He suggested I apply to MIT — that was such an encouragement, and so exciting.

I was coming from a culture where experimentation, freethinking, and having dialogues with other kinds of sciences were not encouraged. There was no platform to do so. At MIT it was just the opposite. Disciplines don’t really exist there. You are never just an architect, or computer science person, or any one thing.

You were always doing projects that had various different perspectives juxtaposed, and everything was collaborative. I realized there is no one way to do things, no one perspective that is universally valid.

All of the projects I’ve initiated since then — like “Opening the Black Box,” or dplay — are collaborative. They come out of that vision that unless you can tell a story in many different ways, you don’t have a story.

Tell us about the forum you initiated at MIT, Opening the Black Box.

Opening the Black Box was a forum for designers to look at the world in different ways. For my master’s thesis, I was trying to build a machine that would design autonomously. At the end of the thesis I concluded to myself that you cannot remove the human out of the design. So instead, I started building systems to enable humans to design further. At that point I was also introduced to the cybernetics principles and some fantastic authors like Heinz von Foerster and Gregory Bateson.

I started discussions comparing artificial intelligence and cybernetics. Principally they differ in many, many different ways. Artificial intelligence supposes that there is an external world where objective reality exists outside us. But in constructivism or cybernetics, there is no reality that exists outside the designer. The world appears as it does because of the human’s nervous system. I tried to connect both theories to design.

So along with my colleague Daniel Rosenberg, I started this forum called “Opening the Black Box,” comparing the different narratives in each of these. We collected literature, papers and movies on the subjects, and we met one day every week and discussed them. It was so popular that it became an independent study course at MIT and was taught for two semesters for credit. I’m delighted that my personal intrigue blossomed and became a platform for others.

Is your definition of success, then, creating collaborative platforms for other people?

For me, the definition of success has really changed. When I was in India and also during my early days at MIT, it was very introspective, meaning it was about me. It was how many papers did I write, or how many talks did I give, or how many things happened to me. My definition of success was around that.

But now I feel there is a significant difference. Now I feel that my success depends on others. It’s not just about creating platforms, but creating platforms where other people become successful.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

First, you have to follow your passion. Very often we run after ideas that are socially validated. I would urge everyone to reflect on what they are really concerned about, and what they’re really passionate about, because at the end it’s all about persistence.

Second, you’ve got to take small steps. At times we have these grand visions of changing the world. It’s fine to be ambitious and have these large visions, but the step forward is usually with whatever resources you have at any moment that you can start. Small steps allow you to start off quickly. That’s always been the case for me, anyway.

The last piece of advice is that you shouldn’t reason too much. It sounds strange, but what I feel is that most of our significant decisions are emotional and not really rational. Looking back at my life, some of the things I’ve done … I couldn’t have reasoned it out. I would say too much reasoning is short-sighted, because you can only reason with things that you can understand and see. But in the long run there is something more to it — I don’t know what it is, but I would not create barriers by reasoning too much.

I would just finish it off with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”

After living in the US for several years, you moved back to India three months ago. Have you gained any new perspectives on your homeland?

When I came back to India, I noticed the Internet speeds were not as fast, things were slow in general … it seemed whatever took three days to complete in the US would take seven days here. There were a lot of frustrations at first, and my first thought was, “It’s simply inefficient.”

But now I feel that the idea of efficiency in the US cannot be directly transferred, simply because of the multiplicities and densities that exist here at every level. Because there are so many, the resources get distributed among a million nodes. Not just material resources, but also information. Delhi, for instance, is a city where small bits of information are distributed. So to get anything done, there is no global way to do it. If, for example, you are building a product and want to, say, get something laser cut, you have to ask a few people to find out who’s the nearest laser cutter. Then you’d go there and find out more about it, until you find where your laser cutter is. So of course three days would turn into seven days. And it would appear inefficient at the individual level.

So why does this work? Why is India doing so well in so many ways? In this environment, a different fabric appears. When there are many, everybody has small resources to share. You start depending on each other, and out of this sheer dependence arises a socio-economic fabric, which is efficient at a system level. One can see it surface everywhere from how the system manages energy, waste, and consumption, to how our cities evolve and how cultural municipalities exist in our society.

So a recent interest of mine is to understand such distributed systems and analyze a place of many. I’ve started writing about this and I’m trying to collaborate with a visual artist to write a book on it. We are calling it Many.

What collaborations have you had with other TED Fellows?

TEDIndia Fellow Nitin Rao is a co-founder of dplay. Skylar Tibbits and I, both from TED 2011, are constantly in discussion and work together at times.

However, the biggest thing the TED Fellowship gave me was belief in myself. I was overawed when I first met the Fellows. They are truly changing the world in their own ways. I felt like a small little ant. But it gave me the belief that if there is enough passion, enough will to give shape to an idea, you can go about doing it.

People say your independent online news source, Malaysiakini, was instrumental in establishing a two-party system in Malaysia.

Up until recently, Malaysia had a single-coalition government ruling party in control since the country became independent in 1957. 2008 was the first time, the ruling party lost a two-thirds majority: they won less than two-thirds of the total seats in the Federal system. They also lost control of five states. It was the biggest defeat ever for the ruling party.

The evidence shows that Malaysiakini and the Internet played a major role in generating the political change in the country. Obviously it’s not just us doing this work, however. There are key political parties that formed over the last ten years. Civil society has grown and played a major role. Yet most people agree that without the opportunity of the Internet, that change would not have happened. The Prime Minister himself, after being asked what he thought went wrong, said his single biggest mistake was to underestimate the power of the Internet.

In Malaysia, Malaysiakini is by far the biggest online news organization. We have covered practically every major story in the country for the last 10 years. We’re also the most popular online news source in the country: we’ve now reached 2.5 million readers per month. We are published in four languages: English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil, which are the four key languages in Malaysia.

What are the risks you run by operating Malaysiakini, and what compelled you to found Malaysiakini despite those risks?

There is great risk: laws that allow for detention in jail without the right to a trial, or media laws like sedition that allow you to be jailed, depending on what you publish.

In the late 1980s, when I was an undergrad studying physics in Australia, I became a social activist. At that time, Asian students were at the forefront of the protests for democracy. With the Tiananmen Square massacre, students challenging Suharto in Indonesia, protests against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines … everywhere in Asia young people were changing the political shape of the continent.

A lot of students like me had come from all over Asia to study in Australia, and it was obviously a very hot discussion about what was happening in our countries, what did it really mean, and what we could contribute. It was a phenomenal education about politics, ideology, and other crosscutting issues.

In Malaysia we have laws that render traditional media outlets very controlled by the government. But in 1995 the government officially decided to keep the Internet free of censorship. Following the “reformasi” protests in 1998, my former colleague Steven Gan and I decided to set up an independent online news source. Steven and I have been arrested and jailed before, but that’s very much a part of what social activism is about. You have to accept certain risks in order to voice dissent.

Malaysia has some laws based on race. As an ethnically Indian Malaysian, how have those laws affected you?

In Malaysia’s constitution, it defines certain Malays and indigenous groups as “Bhumiputera,” which literally translates to “son of the soil.” The constitution actually gives special preferences to Malays. We are one of the few countries in the world that has a race-based constitution.

So although I am a citizen of Malaysia, I have different rights than Malay Malaysians. Often when you’re very young you’re not really aware of it, but when it comes to getting in to universities or applying to jobs, you become particularly aware that there are differences in terms of citizenship in the country. That’s when the discrimination really hits you.

I was particularly affected when my father’s business was not allowed to grow because he was ethnically Indian. Eventually my parents had such a difficult time that they migrated to Australia.

There are lots of other people in Malaysia who have it far worse, however. I come from a middle class background. The working class and other communities not only face ethnic discrimination, but because of their class background, they don’t have access to basic facilities. You can see acute differences in how people are treated based on race. That kind of inequality colors my desire to fight against injustice and to remedy the institution.

What things can we expect to see from Malaysiakini going forward?

In regards to news, we’re heading towards another election, and it’s going to be a very interesting one. We’ll see if the government can recover the ground it lost last time. There’s been a lot of political upheaval in the country since 2008. The old prime minister resigned, there’s a new prime minister, there have been protests, there have been arrests … a huge number of activities going on in the country, and Malaysiakini’s been in the thick of things, so these are very interesting times.

One thing Malaysiakini is doing as an entity is promoting citizen journalism. Since 2008 we’ve trained over 300 citizen journalists. They are now producing thousands of videos and articles from their own countries, towns, and cities that can be viewed on www.cj.my.

What I want to do is ensure that citizen journalism happens everywhere, and not just on our site. We set up four chapters in four towns. This citizen journalism is not just eye-witness reports where citizens go out and take a picture and are done. It’s citizens exploring issues, understanding issues, and reporting it like a journalist would report it: being balanced, having credibility, and keeping it fact-based. It’s been a huge movement in the last couple of years, with quite outstanding results.

In Kinilabs you incubate new projects that promote the mission of Malaysiakini. What are you working on now?

We’re developing two new technologies that we hope to bring to market next year. One is called Jiranku, which translates to “my neighbor.” Jiranku is a mobile app that enables devices to link up directly with each other without a wifi network, 3G, etc. It’s a new type of communication between devices — laptops and mobile phones. Within a closed “society” you will be able to exchange files, share videos, and share photographs, even if you aren’t connected to the Internet. It will be a very useful application, especially in this part of the world, which doesn’t have 3G in excess.

The other thing we are doing is called FeedGeorge, which works with geolocated data. There are lots of online maps these days, and going forward we’re seeing data and maps coming together. With FeedGeorge we take all kinds of data — SMS data, Twitter feed data, foursquare data, traffic jams data, health hazard data, videos from YouTube, and photographs from Flickr — and combine it with maps, so people can learn about what’s happening in the particular location they are in.

Currently these data sets are static — you aren’t easily able to apply them to maps. With FeedGeorge you can combine data with the maps, and keep updating it, and engage with other data sets and maps. Everyone is tracking different sets of data, but with FeedGeorge we are tracking data together.

For example, if a hurricane is going to hit Atlanta or Miami, which US companies will have their stock go down? You can plot all the companies based on where they are, and you can say well, if it hits here or here, these stocks are going to go down. That’s an example of how one app can work off another app: weather patterns, stock market prices, and the projected returns on these companies.

We are already pumping our data — Malaysiakini news stories — into FeedGeorge. So you can see where the news stories are, you can see stories around these stories, and you can see related stories, sorted by geographical region, and things like that. But the new version of FeedGeorge will be much more advanced than that.

You’ve said that in 10 years you want to transition away from Malaysiakini so it doesn’t suffer from Founder’s syndrome. What do you want to transition to?

At the moment, we’re trying to get Malaysiakini on stronger financial footing and to institutionalize its independence, precisely so it does not depend on the founders. I think once I do that, I will look at a few more ideas about what I want to do.

But something a couple friends and I have started to do outside of Malaysiakini is a program called AllStars. It’s an idea like TechStars, or Y Combinator, where a bunch of entrepreneurs are put through a program with mentors to help them accelerate their start-ups.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

I do a lot of entrepreneurial training, I speak a lot about entrepreneurship, and I also speak a lot about social entrepreneurship.

A lot of the rules and the experiences of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship apply in both areas. It’s still about being an entrepreneur. It’s about the idea, the concept, the execution, about resilience, about how to build teamwork, leadership … every single thing you learn about entrepreneurship also applies to social entrepreneurship. I’m very much a proponent of social entrepreneurship, but I tell everyone that just because you’re a social entrepreneur, that doesn’t make you any less an entrepreneur.

A lot of social entrepreneurs have experience in the non-profit world or charity work, and they don’t understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. Approach social entrepreneurship with a capital “E.”

Anab Jain’s design studio Superflux envisions a future where the blind are given ultraviolet vision and invasive species are engineered to combat the effects of climate change. Read on to learn more about her perspective on our not-too-distant future.

How would you describe the work that you do at your revolutionary design studio, Superflux?

We are living in extremely uncertain times. Things are changing rapidly, and everyone is racing to come to terms with the changes being wrought on our society, economy, and culture. As a multidisciplinary collaborative design practice, we at Superflux are in a strong position to help facilitate that process. We’re particularly interested in emerging technologies, and the ways they interface with everyday life.

In the past, your projects have included imagining futures with synthetic bees and wi-fi enabled pets. What’s one of the most exciting things you’re currently working on?

We have been working with Newcastle’s Dr. Patrick Degenaar and his team of neuroprostheticists, who are using the technology of optogenetics to restore sight to those with degenerative visual impairment. We’ve been approaching this project both as designers, and as people interested in exploring the broader implications of new technologies.

In the proposed optogenetic retinal prosthesis, a virus is injected into the eye of a visually impaired person, infecting the cells with a light-sensitive protein. A wearable headset fires pulses of light at these sensitised cells, mimicking the “neural song” the healthy eye uses to communicate with the brain. This artificial song is then interpreted as “vision” by the brain’s imaging centers.

While much of this work is still at the research stage, there is one specific anecdote that highlights the value of incorporating a design approach at this early stage. The researchers have been testing some of their image augmentation concepts with a selection of visually impaired people with a condition in which the “resolution” of their vision is similar to the vision that will be possible with the first generation of these optogenetic retinal prostheses. The researchers learned that a simplified, cartoon-style vision might help participants be able to function more effectively. But the participants found the experience uncanny, often admitting that they’d “rather be blind than have my world look like that.”

So while the technology is exciting, the scientists were approaching their project from a very data-centric, strictly operational direction. As designers, we find ourselves thinking a lot about the emotional experience of such radical technologies, wondering what it might feel like to have your body modified to interface better with a machine, what it might mean to have prosthetic or augmented vision, and what the technology’s operating system and interface might look like. How will it affect the way users relate to other people and, more generally, to their world?

Supeflux’s vision of a headset to enable prosthetic vision.

Through our conversations with the scientists, we realized that, while this prosthetic vision might have a relatively low resolution, the range and variety of potential inputs are vast. Users of the technology would be able to access parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not visible to the ‘normally sighted’. People could, for example, shift into the depths of infrared light to see heat patterns in the environment, or access ultraviolet ‘bee vision’ to see plants and flowers the way bees do. They could also digitally augment their vision, projecting maps, diagrams, and information onto the world around them. We explored some of these scenarios in a short film, dubbed Song of the Machine.

These possibilities had not been envisaged by the scientists, who began to consider what it might mean to live your life, lay down memories, and even fall in love through the lens of this technology. I really think that’s where the value lies in this kind of collaboration and exchange of ideas. In some ways, the most exciting part of this project is that it’s not just “science fiction” or some kind of distant future. We are already working on the next phase of this project: shaping the product invention for commercial purposes, in close collaboration with the technologists and visually impaired community.

You currently have some work being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Yes, two of our projects are on display at MoMA until November 7th, as part of Paola Antonelli’s ‘Talk to Me’ exhibition. One of the projects is Lukalive, a short film about a wi-fi enabled Dalmatian, and the other is the 5th Dimensional Camera.

The 5th Dimensional Camera. (Photo: EPSRC Press)

With the 5th Dimensional Camera, we worked with quantum physicists and material scientists from Oxford University. For this project, the idea was to engage the public with a strand of science that’s extremely abstract and intangible, building on the work of a team of researchers who are trying to build a quantum computer. With quantum computing, parallel information processing opens the door to the fast factorization of enormous data sets. This is exciting and important, but the scientists didn’t quite know how to ‘sell’ their research to the public-at-large. So our brief was to help the public understand the possible uses and implications of this technology.

As part of our research, we spoke with Dr. David Deutsch, widely known as the “father of quantum computing” (he’s given two TED talks). His argument is that, if successful, quantum information processing will prove Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everett’s interpretation says that whenever we observe the outcome of a quantum event, the timeline splits, creating a second world, where the event produced an opposite outcome. It is Dr. Deutsch’s assertion that this is the mechanism by which a quantum computer will function.

We found this idea of multiple universes and branching timelines truly fascinating. For us, the most interesting aspect of quantum computation was not what it might be able to achieve, but what it would say about the very nature of reality. What if you could directly access these other worlds, instead of just using them for information processing? What if we turned that quantum computer inside out?

To create a prop that would help people engage with the science, we began working on something we called the “Fifth Dimensional Camera,” a fictional device that takes photographs of parallel worlds. Much as a quantum computer is said to take a ‘snapshot’ of the many worlds of informational possibilities within itself, the Fifth Dimensional Camera would take a snapshot of the many possible worlds at a human scale. In itself, this was still quite an abstract idea. To help locate the camera in a wider context, we created stories around three characters that engaged with the camera on a daily basis, exploring the potentialities and near misses of their everyday life.

Snapshots of many worlds from the 5th Dimensional Camera. (Photos: Jon Ardern)

You’ve said that you are passionate about building visions of a desirable future. Don’t you feel that some of your designs envision a dark future?

That’s a good question. I think that what we are most keen to highlight is that there’s not just one possible future, but many. We are upfront about the fact that some of our work can be quite provocative. It might not be strictly desirable to have synthetic bees as pollinators, but the technology that could allow this to happen is waiting in the wings. We are interested in imagining interactions: how might biologically-engineered bees coexist with natural bees? If we don’t create these experience prototypes and stories, it’s difficult to fully engage with the technology before it’s out in the world.

Superflux’s synthetic bee prototypes.

Even if we have to reject some of the prototyped possibilities – as impractical, say, or ethically dubious – there will be some that will spark the imagination, leading to real, tangible opportunities for new products and services.

We need look no further than some of the projects we have launched in India. With Project LiloRann, we are developing ideas alongside the local community, helping to combat desertification and looking for creative ways to tackle the impact of invasive species. As we work on a theory of change, our ambition is to design for “positive tipping points” — small-scale interventions with a disproportionate impact, capable of tipping the balance from environmental decline to a subtle remediation.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

You don’t have to be this fresh-faced 21-year-old to be an entrepreneur. If you have an idea, you can go with it at any time. Also, talk to everybody. You don’t know who might be interested in your idea, and you need to be looking for resources in places that you might not otherwise have considered.

In the future, some of your seemingly fantastical designs may become household items. Which of your designs would you most like to be remembered for?

That’s a difficult question, because I’ve increasingly moved away from the worldview of the designer as an icon or hero, known only for one or few “iconic products.” I would hope I’d be remembered for a legacy of thinking, a legacy of creating a new kind of design practice. It’s cheesy, but I hope we’re helping people engage with creating new models for the 21st century — not one particular product, but a widening of perspective.

The previous publishing endeavor in which I was involved was Plátanoverde magazine, a publication that is almost ten years old. The aim of Plátanoverde was to showcase emerging South American artists to a Venezuelan audience. After traveling extensively for almost a decade through the Latin American region, and, in parallel, consuming English-language media (magazines in particular), I realized my next dream project was to bring a modern perspective of Latin America to English-speaking audiences. My partner, Michelle, and I started the Gopher Project, and The Gopher Illustrated Magazine, with that in mind.

The first (left, held by co-editor Michelle Benaim) and current (right, held by Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz) editions of the Gopher Magazine. (Photo: Romina Olson)

To that end, and after living in Caracas, Venezuela for over a decade, Michelle and I moved the project to Austin about a year ago. In a very short space of time, we’ve become a part of the cultural landscape of the city. My in-depth, hands-on approach as a journalist and cultural manager means that I try to immerse myself in where I am, and to be an active part of the community. Michelle and I have devoted a lot of time to understanding this city and seeing it from as many different approaches as possible. We spend a lot of time talking and collaborating with people from different fields in the arts but also with people involved in journalism, advertising, entrepreneurship, science, research and social work. We try to keep our agenda very busy, meeting different people, so we gain a more holistic perspective.

Do you think that a holistic, immersive approach to culture is important?

I believe that the arts and culture are pathways to coexistence and tolerance. I think that fostering tolerance is particularly important right now in the U.S., with its growing diversity. Over 50 million people in the US are Hispanic/Latino — roughly 18 percent of the population. In the last ten years, it was this demographic that made up 85 percent of the population growth in the US. So I think the challenges facing this country now and in the future, and those pertaining to the multiple facets of a Hispanic/Latino identity, need to be addressed — — not only through top-down policies, but also through work, media, and other initiatives that each of us can enjoy.

I remember a particular moment in my life when the power of culture really hit home. As a kid growing up in South America I would listen to music in English — rock, electronic, hip-hop, whatever. And then one day I heard this amazing record, and I found out that it was from my own country, Venezuela. I remember understanding that not only was it good in itself, but that it was something I could find pride in — I was part of it, in a sense, because it was a product of my country.

I have always come back to that simple idea: that people should have reasons to be proud of their cities, their culture, their heritage. Taking pride in what one is a part of is a force that is far more powerful — and frankly, far more consequential — than any policy, budget or anything like that.

The power to create something beautiful connects individuals to the feeling that each of us has a hand in creating better futures. And we can all create positive changes, whether it is through a huge project, a small magazine, or just deciding to do whatever it is in your hands to do.

Caracas has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Some 100 people are killed by violence each a week. This is unspeakably high, especially considering that it’s a city that houses some six million people. Nobody walks in the streets after dark because it’s just too dangerous.

After we had reached some success with Plátanoverde and related cultural projects, it just seemed that the only thing to do was to address some of the enormous problems that the citizens of Caracas face, even with the limited tools we had. When we sat down and talked about this, the first thing that came to mind was violence and the (understandably waning) pedestrian culture. We created the Por el Medio de la Calle festival so that, for one night, people would come into the streets of Caracas after dark to celebrate arts and culture together, to have an opportunity to reconnect with the freedom to walk after dark. It’s grown from a festival of 2,000 people to one in which 45,000 people attend. It is now in its sixth edition.

Por el Medio de la Calle festival goers.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Be honest, listen to, and support others. When you’re part of a community, it is as important to support others, as it is to support yourself and your projects. As a community grows, there are more opportunities for everybody, so you and your projects will benefit by extension.

With the new perspective of Latin America that the Gopher Projectbrings, what eye-opening things should we expect to see from it?

For the near future, we have three plans: The first is the next edition of the magazine, and an exhibition that will run along with it, in March of next year. It will feature even more collaborations in literature, visual arts and design — not only what’s happening in South America, but also what’s happening worldwide, and featuring some interesting things from Austin. We print “Proudly published from Austin, Texas” on the cover of TheGopher magazine. We are interested in conveying to our national and international readership that we are part of the exciting stuff that’s happening in this city.

The second is that we are bringing an exhibition called “Tipos Latinos” or “Latin Type” to the U.S. for the first time. It’s a biennial of contemporary typography from Latin America, and is among the most important events of its kind anywhere in the world. We’re working to have some conferences and workshops that run parallel to the exhibition, and are collaborating with the local chapter of AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts).

And lastly, we are opening a design studio called In House International. In line with our other projects, it’s showcasing emerging designers. It has two different locations: one here in Austin and the other in South America. It will bring together a number of designers, illustrators and other artists from Latin America and other parts of the world, who will work together remotely.

In House International logo.

My really long-term dream is to run some sort of a cultural center that will celebrate Latin American culture in a cross-disciplinary way: visual and performing arts and music, as well as literature and design and innovative media. When Plátanoverde started, the idea was that it was a project that would grow in different stages. It would begin as a magazine, then evolve into publishing books, events, festivals, and finally a cultural center. It was slated to be a center based on the concepts of social inclusion and culture. Sadly, due to the really difficult political and economic situation in Venezuela, it’s not something that came to be.

It’s rumored you have a collection of over 2,000 print magazines. How do you feel about the transition to online magazines?

I once interviewed the editor of this very famous British magazine called Monocle. He said something very insightful. It was that the question is not whether we’ll be reading on paper or a handheld device or on the moon … it’s what are we going to be reading? From my perspective, having something on paper means that that content must earn its place as a permanent object in time. Publishing on paper should not try to compete with the Internet — they are different animals. But certain content earns the right to physical space, and to a spot on a bookshelf. A magazine is like a small gallery, a conversation and a cultural snapshot that you can hold in your hands.

The publishing of The Gopher’s platforms run at different speeds. The paper magazine is published every six months — it’s a highly curated process. Online we have small articles, interviews, features, and things in audio and video format — things that are more time-sensitive. The two parts complement each other.

Speaking of complementing each other, you’ve recently had a lot of collaborations with other TED Fellows.

Yes, the most recent edition of The Gopher featured four TED Fellows. One of the Fellows was Jon Gosier, who created an amazing infographic about “the population of the dead.” The data alone is amazing. We feature three different infographics in every edition of the magazine, because we feel that information design is a wonderful medium for conveying information.

We also featured TED Fellow Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo. Fellows Mitchell Joachim and Candy Chang both contributed their thoughts about the structure and future of cities. Candy had this amazing insight. She said, “I would have more places to sit down in the city. Because if you can’t sit down, you basically can’t live the city outside.”

I’m also working with Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran on a project to create an event in South America, bringing in different, alternative art projects and spaces in the region. We have a running joke — we call it “El TEDo.”

It’s an amazing thing that these cells actually grow outside the body. But if we’re going to make them thrive, we need to do a better job of making the cells feel like they’re in their natural environment. That’s one of my main responsibilities — developing systems that we call “bioreactors” that mimic their environment. The cells are really doing everything; we’re just giving them the right environment. It’s like building them a little home where they’re happy.

Once you have the cells and the scaffolding in the bioreactor, you add the “schmutz:” food and chemicals that the cells need.

Then, at our lab we do something unique: we combine all those things with what we call “biophysical cues.” Biophysical cues, such as mechanical forces for the bones and electrical signals for the heart, for the most part have been ignored by biologists and people who study cells. But biophysical cues are really important because the ideal “home” is going to be different for every kind of cell. Bones in the body, for example, experience a lot of mechanical stress. Those bone cells actually need that mechanical stress in order to be happy. To build a bioreactor for bone cells, you’ll probably want to copy that, and you’ll want to provide scaffolding that mimics what the cells would grow on in the body — probably something hard. To build a bioreactor for heart cells, the scaffolding would probably be something soft, like collagen, that is elastic and can bend and beat.

Nina with a perfusion-stimulation bioreactor and a piece of bone scaffold.

For which cells are electrical signals most significant?

The three main places that I’ve looked for inspiration in terms of electric fields are in early development, the adult lifetime of the heart, and wound healing. Embryos have tons of electric fields, and they’ve been implicated in getting cells to migrate and transform themselves from “undifferentiated” stem cells into more specialized cells like neurons, bone cells, muscle cells, etc. These currents are really important for getting the cells to move around the embryo. Some of the migration is thought to be caused by electrical fields. A colleague of ours has reversed electrical fields and gotten the heart to beat on the right instead of the left.

In development and during an adult lifetime in the heart, we look for inspiration from the EKG and electro-mechanical coupling. That’s sort of what the field has focused on up until now.

Wound healing is also really interesting. Our bodies are full of salt water, and anytime a cell is cut — like in an injury — those salts spill out. Those are charged particles that are moving, which means it’s a current. So any time you have a cut, there’s an electrical field associated with that wound. Those electrical fields have been measured, and we know they decline with age. It’s a cutting-edge topic in regenerative and aesthetic medicine; people are working on how to stimulate wound healing through application of currents.

These are the three main sources of inspiration for my work. And each of these types of signals is going to require different types of bioreactors. Each of those technologies is going to look really different. I call them “enabling technologies” because it’s really the cells that do the work.

What types of technologies are taking your work the next step?

Microtechnology, for one. We’re miniaturizing electrodes. Instead of having a piece of carbon rod that’s 3 mm thick, we work on scaling that down. We think, “How do we make a micro technology that mimics that?” We’ve started patterning electrodes onto glass using lasers. We can grow cells on them, and we can stimulate single cells.

We have much more control over experiments at a microscale than we do at a macroscale. For example, if you want to create natural flow for fluids on a microscale, you don’t have to have turbulence. In a river at the submilimeter scale the flow is perfect. It’s calm, you don’t need any turbulence in order to get it to flow, and fluids, when side-by-side, do not necessarily mix, except by diffusion. That means we can control concentrations both in time and space very precisely!

Nina using a microscope.

And it’s really amazing what we can use off the shelf in terms of technology. One of my students has been building an app for a smartphone so we can control our bioreactors from our phones, instead of having to build a controller from scratch!

So what’s the big, hairy dream behind all this?

To get rid of heart disease. The really hairy goal is not just to grow a heart, but that sort of “fountain of youth” element of being able to extend our lives.

Right now heart disease kills more people than all cancer combined. I’d love to see that change.

Have you experienced any controversy from your experiments based on animals and stems cells?

No, I haven’t, actually, at least not personally (we’ve all felt the effects of the changing political environment, though). I am vegetarian, and at restaurants people will say, “Will you get freaked out if I order a steak?” And I say, “No, there’s a karma footprint that each person has.” I choose not to eat meat, but do choose to engage in experiments that involve the sacrifice of animals. I put those things on the same spectrum.

But one thing that I will say is that, in my experience, everyone who’s involved in these experiments has always been very thoughtful, and there are a lot of controls that are in place before you can ever get anywhere near an animal. I think that those controls are really good. They involve members of the lay community — not just researchers and clinicians.

I just sort of hope that when judgment day comes, that, having led a thoughtful life, and having tried to make up for the damage that I’ve done to life and the earth, that I will be judged fairly. But I try to live by my conscience, and I try to see all actions and choices we make — not just scientific research — as sort of the same package. So far I feel OK with where I am on the spectrum, but it’s something I constantly revisit.

You’ve said your TED Fellowship has been incredible for you, and even led to a potential book deal. Have you had any interesting collaborations with other Fellows?

Suzanne Lee is growing clothing out of bacteria. We were talking and wondered, “What if we applied electrical stimulation? Would we be able to get the cells to align?” And Lucianne Walkowicz and I are collaborating on a science summer camp project for girls in India, slated for Summer 2013.

All the Fellows form this amazing community. They’re so cool and so nice!

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Work your idea into every conversation you have, because you never know who can help. A project some of my colleagues and I are working on is a girls’ science summer camp in India. In my experience, you may even have to end up turning people down, because people get so excited about what you’re doing. Keep it on the surface.

The other piece of advice is kind of the same: live your mission. Be on your best behavior. If you believe in goodness, then live goodness. And when you’re talking about your good project, it will be authentic.

Do you really have a double life as an assassin?

[Laughs] I’m involved in the shadow government of Street Wars. It’s a three-week long, immersive water gun tournament. My name in Street Wars is “The Duchess.” And I’m a very accomplished assassin as well as bodyguard. We’ve played across the world, and it’s so much fun.

Street Wars started as a reaction to 9/11. A lot of us wondered, “What’s happened to our city? It’s not fun anymore. It used to be such a playground. Now it just seems like a tomb.” We were all so afraid …. We just really wanted to reclaim the city as a playground. That’s where it started. I think it was really successful in that respect.

Common sense tells us that negative things like violence, smoking behaviors and unhealthy eating habits are socially contagious: they spread from person to person, family to family, and are even influenced by television and other things. If this is the case, why can’t we make healthy behaviors contagious? Why can’t we make a positive health epidemic? We can use these strong social interactions to actively prevent the spread of major chronic disease epidemics, and perhaps even reverse them.

What are micro-clinics, and how do they work?

Micro-clinics are not an infrastructure of buildings; they’re an infrastructure of people, of human relationships. At Microclinic International, we recognize that we did not create these infrastructures: they already exist in a community. It’s important for us to find good local partners, we work with doctors and nurses, gain their local expertise and train them in ours. Then we recruit people to join our micro-clinic groups. We don’t ask them to come as individuals; they have to come as groups. Naturally, they bring their husband, wife, sister, cousin, or best friend who lives next door…

Together, they all go through the program, which shares access to basic education about the disease. They learn how to change important behaviors like how they eat and exercise. They learn about medication, how to take it, how to use certain technologies like a glucose monitoring system, and how to interact with their doctor. They participate in group activities such as, eating healthy meals together.

Because they go through the program as a group, there’s less chance of being ridiculed at home for eating strange foods or coming up with weird ideas from strange doctors and nurses. The group acts as a support system and the positive changes are implanted back into the home. If the husband — in a traditional culture — says, “We’re going to eat healthy meals,” and the wife (it is usually the women who cook) has the ability to prepare the meal, then the other members of the family will not put up as much resistance. Maybe the children will even encourage the parents to exercise. They all learned together, and they made friends with other people going through similar problems.

Microclinic International initiated programs in the Middle East in 2005, yet you’ve already expanded to four different continents.

Yes, we initially focused on diabetes, first in Palestine, and now in Jordan and India.

In Kenya we’re working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The project is based on Mfangano Island in the middle of Lake Victoria. Kenya suffers from one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world, not to mention the economy is simply devastated. This project is particularly interesting because we’re working closely with the Organic Health Response, which has built a solar powered community center that will have Internet access. People will have the incentive and cover to come to the clinic for the Internet, and then once they are tested for HIV/AIDS, they can be placed in micro-clinic groups. This will reduce the stigma.

Interestingly, we’re now bringing the insights we’ve gained working in those countries back to the United States. We’ve started a project in Appalachia in Kentucky. We’re really excited about figuring out how to tackle the obesity-diabetes epidemics here in the US, focusing on the root behaviors — diet and exercise — that contribute to them.

In all of our global operations we’ve partnered with a range of institutions, because we believe these massive global health challenges are not challenges that can be solved by a single institution working alone. These are global problems and they need global solutions with the private sector, government, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions working together. I think that is the model for the future: to get every single stakeholder involved and at the table.

One of those partners is the Queen of Jordan, who I hear recently made a visit to one of your micro-clinics.

Yes, we’re very fortunate to have the support of Her Majesty, Queen Rania, and also the Ministry of Health. She recently came to one of the areas where we are working. When she visited, she got to see first-hand how enthusiastic the participants of this program are about it, and how they’ve really taken ownership of it. Significant numbers of participants have lost weight and have reduced their blood sugar levels. These sorts of outcomes could have real implications for the health of the nation as a whole, because we want to replicate the program and spread it around the kingdom. Depending on how much we’re able to scale it, many thousands of lives and millions of dollars could be saved.

Queen Rania visiting a micro-clinic.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Be very, very cautious with your ideas, because ideas can be very good things, but they can also be very bad things. A German poet once warned that ideas were so dangerous that they could in fact bring down entire nations. At the same time I urge courage: take an idea that is sound and think about its implications. Think about how to test it on a smaller scale, where the damage can be limited if there are mistakes. If it’s successful, one can observe its success very clearly, and demonstrate that success before taking it to the next level.

That’s why we, as an organization, are doing what’s necessary to very rigorously test our ideas using the best scientific resources that we have available, to make sure that not only aren’t we doing any harm to the local communities, but that we are doing good.

You have a long-standing passion for the Middle East affairs, and have said you hope to address the violence there. What’s the link between that goal and Microclinic International?

Years ago, when I would talk to people about the program, I would say, “This is not simply a health problem. This is also a problem for governments and institutions concerned about stability, peace and security.” And in response I would maybe get a nod.

But this year we’ve seen the Middle East completely transformed. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but one thing that’s for sure is that things are changing quickly, and they are quite eruptive. I really believe that at the heart of the changes are people who are concerned about the basic essentials of life.

A few years ago, there was a major poll done in the Arab World, where people were asked, “What are the things that concern you most?” Not to my surprise, the first thing on the list was health. In my experience, people are really concerned with the most basic things in life. They’re concerned with, “Do I have adequate health care? Do I have adequate education? Is our family suffering financially? Do my kids have a job?” I really see our work in global health with Microclinic International, and more generally, the field of international development, as being inextricably linked to future peace and stability in the Middle East. There can never be a resolution between the nations of the region, there can never be internal harmony within the countries, until the most basic essentials are addressed. And I would put health right at the top of that list, because it affects every aspect of life. It affects the way families function, it affects the way they live their lives, it affects the way they work, their buying power, their ability to relax and to reduce stress levels.

There’s an old Arab proverb that says, “When there is health, there is hope. When there is hope, one has everything.” I think that really sums it up. The future of the region is really changing forever, and governments around the world really need to think seriously about evidence-based programs that improve the quality of life for people in the region. These things don’t have to cost a lot, but they have to be evidence-based, and in my view, some of the greatest challenges really have quite simple solutions.

With something as simple as changing our eating and exercising habits, we can combat major disease epidemics that some have said will rival the plagues of the Middle Ages. These simple steps can dramatically reduce human suffering, improve economic productivity, and create a more equitable and peaceful world.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-daniel-zoughbie/feed/0alanaherroDanielZoughbie_TED_QAAfricaQueen RaniaFellows Friday with Eric Berlowhttp://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-eric-berlow-2/
http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-eric-berlow-2/#commentsFri, 16 Sep 2011 14:00:01 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=52120[…]]]>Positive feedback loops can be found in even the messiest conflicts, ecosystems and corporations, according to Eric Berlow. The trick, he tells TED, is to not confuse the means with the ends.

You work on problems from a “network” or “systems” perspective. How has this practice evolved for you?

In the past, I’ve mostly focused on networks in nature: how species are interconnected. Then I began to see how networks could be applied more generically, and I got very interested in the potential applications network thinking had to other types of complex problems.

What are some of the complex problems you are working on now?

Currently, I’m working for a foundation on mapping the structure of successful non-violent movements in the Middle East. In particular, we’re focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are all the moving parts of a successful non-violent movement? How are they all related? Are there some positive feedback loops, with points of entry that we haven’t thought of before?

I have also been working with a large corporation on the future energy supply and it’s relation to food and water security. If, for example, we replaced all fossil fuels with bio-fuels, they would conflict with land for food production. And if we powered everything with electricity, that would strain water resources, because a lot of electrical production, even renewable electricity, is water-use intensive. There’s a lot of interest in mapping out how we can meet our need for energy, food and water simultaneously.

Additionally, I’ve just started collaborating with an interesting start-up, Open Data Registry, on sustainable supply chains. For example, we worked with data from Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles project. For a number of their clothing articles, you can go online and trace where the raw materials came from, how much energy and carbon emissions were expended, how much waste was produced, etc. We compiled all the data for all the supply chains of every product and mapped it as a clothing ‘ecosystem’. Then you can visualize the entire web for the whole corporation, and see which one aspect of the whole production would have the most impact in increasing efficiency for the entire company. Maybe there’s one factory or shipping route that, with increased efficiency, would change everything down the line from there.

To me, the most interesting thing about diving in to complex problems is that, on the one hand, one problem leads to many problems, but that also means that a single solution can cause many solutions.

I can think of lots of situations where one problem causes many others. Can you give an example where one solution causes many more solutions?

Some time ago I designed and built a house in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I wanted it to be sustainably designed, but I had a very tight budget. It’s really a whole complex system of trying to figure out how to get the biggest bang for your buck when building a green home.

Eric in the High Sierra.

Many people would ask me, “Did you put in solar panels for electricity?” But actually, when you look at the whole system, that’s the last thing I’d do to get the most for my money. It turns out that the most important thing for achieving low-cost sustainable design is having a small place, that’s well insulated, with windows and overhangs in the right place for that location and climate.

The second biggest controllable cost was heating for the building, and for water. In that case, the cheapest thing was, in fact, to have solar thermal panels to heat water. The water goes through the concrete floors, the sun heats the concrete floors in the day in the wintertime, it heats the shower water, and also heats the hot tub on the way back. So, with one pretty low-tech and cheap system, I’m heating the house, the shower, and the hot tub — while saving hundreds of dollars a month in the wintertime on propane. I’d choose solar panels for electricity last, because with efficiency efforts my electricity bill is only $30 a month.

I give that example, because most people initially focus on the means, rather than the end goal. Amory Lovins has a great quote: “People don’t want gas and electricity. They just want hot showers and cold beer.” In my case, my goal was: comfortable temperature inside, with the minimum amount of energy input and a minimum cost.

So what’s your advice for the Average Joe who is overwhelmed by a complex problem?

Well, you can map things out till the cows come home, but as the Amory Lovins quote illustrates, if you don’t really know what your goals are, then there’s no point to it. More often than not, people get overwhelmed because they’re confused about what their goal is. They conflate a goal with an implementation strategy. A perfect example of that is when people have a goal to be happy, and they think the way to get there is to make more money. So making money becomes the goal, and they forget the goal was to be happy. Then they wonder why they’re disappointed later.

Do you actually use the kind of visual map that you used in your TEDTalk to solve the problems you work on?

Yes, though before I had those tools I did it more by hand.

The kinds of tools that I use now were developed by my good friend and colleague for food web visualization. If you have more than 10 or 15 moving parts, you can’t really visualize that in your head. When you have 100 moving parts that’s 10,000 possible connections, and it really pays to have some aid to plot it all out and let the patterns emerge out of the pile.

Once all those things are all plotted, the human brain is really good at detecting patterns visually. Think about how, in a room of 100 people, you can pretty quickly and instantly tell the difference between everybody’s face. Those are amazing visual recognition skills.

I do a lot of plotting of the who’s connected to who stuff visually, turn it upside down, look at it in different ways, and order it in different ways. That way I can quickly see where clusters emerge, where things pop out at the center, which are the most important, and that sort of thing.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

I’ve been an academic researcher for years. But I have been seeing so much innovation and potential in the private sector. So a couple weeks ago I quit my university job in order to pursue these things more seriously. It’s scary, because I know how academia works, and it’s pretty secure, but I was feeling a little bit constrained in my ability to be creative and take risks.

So I’m just kind of jumping out there into the unknown. The main thing that I’m trying to focus on is my values. There’s definitely temptation and opportunities to just make money applying my skills. But I keep realizing that I really only want to work on projects that I feel have potential for exceptional social or environmental good. So remember to stick to your values and what’s really exciting to you. The more excited you are, the better you’ll do, and you’ll have infectious enthusiasm about what you do.

The other thing is, I’ve found doing my research that I’m most successful when I’m doing projects with people that I really like to work with. Life is short. We spend a lot of our time working. We may as well be working with people that are really fun, exciting and inspiring to work with.

Besides working, you also spend a lot of your time skiing. Why are you so dedicated to it?

I do spend a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada skiing, and I would say most of my good, creative ideas come while I’m skiing uphill. To ski uphill, you put what are called “skins” on the bottom of our skis, and your heel is free, so you walk uphill with your skis, take the skins off, and ski down.

Eric skiing uphill.

I’m a very kinetic thinker … my entire mini-TEDTalk was written in my head while I was walking uphill. And I pretty much wrote all of the paper for my thesis that was published in Nature while skiing uphill.

How did the idea for your TED Fellows retreat, “Think Weird Go Big” get generated?

TED2010 was amazing and I loved it. Afterwards, I realized that my favorite part was actually meeting the other Fellows. I realized that as a group we were all doing such different things, but everybody was taking their little project to the next level, trying to go bigger with it. And it made me think, “I can do that, too.” That’s how Jessica Green (another TED Fellow) and I came up with the Think Weird Go Big project. The idea was to have a small self-coaching retreat to support each other in reaching our next goals.

We’re all at a place in our lives where we have similar kinds of constraints and obstacles. By hearing about one person getting past their obstacles, everybody else gets something out of it. Living together, cooking meals together and getting to know each other in that intimate setting, even for just a few days, makes it extremely easy to follow up with each other for advice and even collaborations .

My personal project that I discussed at Think Weird Go Big was figuring out how to use my background in ecology and network theory and apply it for social and environmental good in the private sector.

I also got feedback on the company I’m going to start, called Brazil Nut Effect. The name refers to when you shake a pile of mixed nuts and the large Brazil nuts rise to the surface. The company will create tools to help the important nuggets emerge out of the mess. I feel like I’m just at the beginning of this new phase in my life, and that’s pretty exciting.

You describe yourself as a “moving image artist.” Why not a “documentary filmmaker”?

Moving image artist comes with a less troubled definition. When I’ve referred to myself as a documentary filmmaker, people have questioned whether or not what I do is in fact documentary films. And I’m interested in that debate. Referring to myself as an artist can lead to a whole lot more questions. So I feel Moving Image Artist is more precise, in a general kind of way, and it’s a quick way of saying I make films within a fine art context.

How did your professional artistic career begin?

At the time, I was living in Los Angeles and made a piece called Imago. It’s a portrait of actors in their day jobs, delivering their favorite lines from a movie. Imago marked the beginning of me feeling comfortable as an artist. I think when you feel very at home with a piece of work, it resonates.

Imago (Still), 2006

What do you hope people take away from your films?

I like to think I am creating a flat canvas in which people can project themselves. I want the work to be about submitting to a lack of understanding, and feeling slightly comfortable with being confused — or just accepting that not everything is solvable. I like incompletion.

All Shades of Grey (Still), 2009

I battled for a while in my practice between my film school training, and what I learnt working in television. Both experiences were outcome driven but I prefer process-led.

What does it mean to you to be “process-led”?

In a documentary about mountaineering, a climber talked about his survival strategy. He said what separates him from death is that he thinks of five or six different routes before he begins the climb. He does this knowing that when he actually does the climb, he will probably discover a seventh route that he hasn’t thought of.

I thought it was very poignant because it expresses a degree of flexibility. On the one hand, it’s being a bit of a control freak, where you have to design a process or path, and you’re very well prepared. On the other hand, you have the flexibility and good spirit to be able to throw everything overboard. I try to be attentive to the moment when making work.

In addition to your own filmmaking, you’ve recently taken on a more curatorial role. Tell us about that.

We’re doing this with an intention to incite debate around “What constitutes a documentary form?” and “How can we reinstate a culture of documentary films being made with the process in mind, rather than the outcome?”

The challenge this year was to see whether we could put a program together that would be interesting, challenging and successful in terms of an audience response. We were lucky to be able to show works by some very well known artists like Luke Fowler, Maria Marshall and Margaret Salmon. But some of the lesser known artists like Erica Scourti or Fred Lindberg got the liveliest reactions from the audience, which made us very happy and proud. We were also lucky to have had some support from LUX and Sheffield Doc/Fest.

What first got you interested in filmmaking?

My dad is a bit of a film buff and we were permitted to watch films from a very young age that were entirely unsuitable for us. [Laughs] We’re talking Pasolini and Fassbinder and people like that. I’m still allergic to those two filmmakers as a result of early exposure.

But I started off with more of a campaigning interest, because I developed a degree of political-mindedness — typical for a teenager, I guess. I saw documentaries on television that swayed me one way or another on environmentalism or politics. I thought, “That’s the thing to do to change the world. You must make documentaries!”

This youthful idealism got replaced by a more individualistic need and a kind of defiance that I really wasn’t going to be able to change the world. [Laughs]

You were working in broadcast TV in the UK, then took the leap to filmmaking on your own. What was the catalyst for the change?

I was freelancing in different crew positions, from being a researcher to doing camera work, and eventually got a couple of mini commissions to do two short documentaries for television. I enjoyed the opportunity, and I still like those films. It solidified my interest in portraiture. But I made those films with a television context in mind. In the process I became very clear-headed about my future in broadcast TV, in terms of being able to produce work that falls outside the realm of what is considered documentary form. Although I like working with limitations in the short-term, it didn’t fit in well with my long-term creative aspirations.

At the time, I was also working for a major UK broadcast institution with a senior producer-director whose project — a two-part series — was failing miserably. I figured if an institution that has a great deal of resources, man power, knowledge and expertise can throw all this at a project that fails, then I can go with my lack of expertise, with my lack of money, and my lack of knowledge, and I can do the same thing and fail just as well, and just as profoundly! It was a challenge I set myself, and that’s how I began my full-length documentary, Anatomy of Failure.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

I’m not a social entrepreneur. But I like uncertainty, being a novice. Usually there is a great deal of fear attached. I try to listen to this fear and do it nonetheless.

For me fear of success is as big of an issue as fear of failure, perhaps even bigger. With success comes a different set of demands, different relationship to how you work, who you work with, and what the expectations are. With success comes responsibility. Those are scary things. [Laughs]

The TED Fellowship is a sign of success. Has that success been scary?

The TED Fellowship has put me into turbo mode, and the experience stirred up a lot of questions about the way I operate. When you have that kind of endorsement, it becomes necessary to question yourself, because you have these very dedicated people who are supporting you and believing in you. I feel I’m on some kind of stage for this year, and want to perform well, whether it is developmental growth or professional.

In addition to being an artist, I work as a lecturer and I freelance in production. My artwork and what I put out has no economic tie to these other activities. I make work regardless of any financial returns.

The TED Fellowship, in a way –- rightly or wrongly, I’m not sure — somehow instilled in me that there has to be economic return in my activities. Maybe that’s an assumption of mine. Maybe any professional practice needs to consider a business strategy. I’ve never had to or wanted to consider thinking of my art practice in those terms.

In particular at TED in Long Beach, we had a really useful workshop with Colleen Keegan from Creative Capital, where we heard a very eloquent presentation about artists’ lack of focused attempts at professional development. This was not a conversation about money. It was about logistics, organization, and efficiency. And about knowing when to take breaks!

I Remember (Still), 2010

You said you feel a bit like you’re on stage this year. What are some of your plans for it?

I am in Austria right now filming my grandmother and parents. I have a very loose plan for what will probably be a long-term project, which is based on a road trip from Austria to Iran my parents took me on as a two-year-old.

I want to take this road trip again, exploring with my parents two things: one, personal history. My Iranian father and Austrian mother are in their seventies now, and have a changing perspective on how their cross-cultural relationship impacted their children. Two: maybe this is too ambitious, but putting the personal history in context with the changing political landscape of Europe as we cross it.

I wonder what it would have been like in the late 1960s for a young Austrian woman to say, “I’m going to go off to live in Iran with my Iranian husband.” According to my mother, people thought she was slightly insane. Given public perception about Iranian society on the whole — people tend to consider it savage, even to this day — I can’t imagine what it would have been like in the late 1960s.

There is a series of pictures from this trip. One is an image of me and my sister, tiny toddlers in the 1970s, holding up two number plates, an Austrian and an Iranian one. At the top of the photo it says “Iran.” We are at the border crossing. The film will stop there.

As a TED Senior Fellow, you got to attend TEDGlobal 2011. How was your first TEDGlobal experience?

It was unbelievable. I’ve been to two previous TEDs in Long Beach, but TEDGlobal was a very different experience: us Fellows had some more time to bond, which was great. The entering class of Fellows at TED Global 2011 was ridiculously awesome. I always walk away from TED feeling like, “Wow, I’m doing nothing. I have to do more.” Seeing the other Fellows always give me such inspiration.

It’s amazing to track how I am personally developing through TED Conferences. Part of being a Fellow means receiving validation for my crazy ideas. The rest of the world may think I’m nuts, but the TED team thinks I should be nurturing those ideas and building on them.

Tell us about some of those “crazy ideas” that TED inspired you to follow up on. What’s next on your plate?

I’m starting a non-profit organization called Street Symphony that brings live music to the homeless and mentally ill on Skid Row. The mission statement of the non-profit is to bring music to the most underserved communities throughout L.A. I also want to play for autistic children, veterans, victims of massive brain trauma, prisoners, at hospices, on Indian reservations ….

At my first TED, I spoke about my experience with Nathaniel Ayers, a paranoid schizophrenic musician. Seeing all the things other Fellows and TEDsters were doing, it wasn’t enough anymore to have just had this experience with Nathaniel. I desperately wanted to come back to TED, and to expand my work I’d begun with Nathaniel. So when I came back to TED as a Senior Fellow, Adrian Hong, one of the other Senior Fellows, said, “If you want to do something, you should start a non-profit.” And we sat down and did a budget right there at TED. Now he’s on my board.

In terms of career paths, I’m extremely happy where I am right now. Playing with the LA Philharmonic is a dream job. Our new director, Gustavo Dudamel, is a genius, and it is amazing to make music with him. And we play at Disney Hall, and I have a chance to live in LA, and there is all this amazing music happening here.

You recently recorded your Kickstarter-funded debut album, which includes your original Indian Raga, European classical music, and American music composed for you. When will the album be released?

We still have to do editing, mastering, producing, and pressing. We’re aiming for the beginning of next year for the release.

Recording the album was an incredible experience. We were able to record at Disney Hall, and I had the chance to play on an amazing violin: the 1716 Milstein Stradivarius. For me, to even be in the same room as that instrument makes me act like a puppy on Ritalin. I just go nuts.

Robert during his recording session in Disney Hall.

I could have done something more conventional, but I really wanted to say something personal with my debut album. I always swore to myself that I would learn to play Indian classical music, and I had never done that before. So between Wikipedia and iTunes and YouTube, I taught myself how to write a raga. The journey of the recording is from that raga, going to LA, where we play music composed in LA for me. So it’s a journey across time and space, across the world, that you can see musically.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Something that I learned from Derek Sivers, who has spoken at TED very often: “Just do it.”

Another thing I’ve learned from amazing social entrepreneurs at TED is that you don’t have to ask for money first. You don’t have to build up this base of funding and then go and start. It doesn’t work that way. If you have an idea, whether it’s an idea the world thinks is nuts, or it’s one the world embraces, go and do it. Ask for money when you establish that base of what you’re doing.

Ideas evolve. Tim Harford’s TEDtalk talks about “The God Complex,” where people have an idea and think it’s the one and only way things should be done. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to find a way, do it, be wrong, then find a way that it evolves and works.

It’s pretty unusual for such an accomplished musician to have a background in neurobiochemistry. How did you find yourself studying the two disciplines?

I always played music growing up. Then as I started college, my parents said, “Ok, you have a choice. You can either be a doctor or a musician, and you’re going to be a doctor.”

So I still studied music, but I started a degree in pre-med biology. And I loved it. I started a few research internships in neurobiochemistry. While I was at Harvard, I was introduced to Gottfried Schlaug, a researcher who had done work on music and the brain. In one of his experiments, he had given singing lessons to stroke victims who could no longer speak. He found that after 70 or 80 hours of singing lessons, the stroke victims recovered some ability to speak again. It totally blew my mind.

Gottfried himself was a musician, so I asked him, “How was it for you, leaving music behind, and becoming this amazing scientist? I would love to do this, but I still really want to play music.” He looked at me and said, “If I could go back and choose between music and medicine, even knowing what I’ve accomplished now with science, I would still choose music.”

And that was exactly how I felt about music. From that point, I decided for myself that I had to find a way to play music. So after that, I went to Yale for two years and did a master’s in music there. I had no idea what I was going to do next.

I thought that I would probably have to give up playing and go to medical school and not professionally play. But I wanted to try at least one orchestral audition. I figured I would flunk out the first or second round. But I got the job. It was a shock. It was a shock for about two years.

It seems a part of you felt it would be better for the world if you had chosen to help people by being a doctor. Have you made peace with your decision?

Sort of. After I moved out to L.A., I met Nathaniel Ayers, which I talk about in my TEDtalk. And that was an epiphany for me. I saw that I didn’t have to be a doctor to make a difference in this guy’s life.

When I was with Nathaniel, there was this moment when he was starting to have a manic episode, and it was pretty scary. But I just picked up my violin and started playing. I think if he had been in a clinical setting, it would have ended very negatively. He would have been tied down, he would have been pumped full of drugs. Both parties would have felt horrible about what would have happened. But music spoke to him where words failed. And the music calmed him down. It brought him to aspects of his life that were too painful to bring up otherwise.

I learned that the music wasn’t only about creating this space in the hall. I learned the music could exist at a very strong level outside Disney Hall. And when it did that, it could actually be medicinal. It could be therapeutic. There have been other cases like that, where music has strongly affected people I’ve played for — people with cerebral palsy and veterans.

I had always felt that music was very powerful, and ought to be brought to places outside the concert hall, but I didn’t have a medium through which to express that. Somehow TED made me feel fearless, and address the idea I had been thinking about for years.

My TED talk was titled “Music is Medicine, Music is Sanity.” I want to prove it. I just had a meeting with neuroscientists from the University of Southern California that are starting a brain and creativity institute there. I also have plans to work with neuroscientists at Claremont College. I’d like to implement their findings of how music is therapeutic, how it is effective, in the field itself.

While playing music for people with mental and other illnesses, you’ve found your music to have a very soothing effect. But can music be more than just a sedative?

Yes, there will be more that it can do when I involve those people themselves in making music. The next step is to create some kind of workshop where the music is active and hands on. Playing music, being actively engaged in a creative process, is what is really incredible.

Robert performing in a Street Symphony concert in March. (Photo: Cooper Bates)

Why is that creative process so important? What do you believe it does?

It’s really incredible. I found that when Nathaniel actually created music himself, he wasn’t delusional.

Nathaniel’s delusions only exist in his head. Playing music is a way to get that delusion out of his head — to literally express that. When he expresses it, when he hears it, and when others hear it, it’s real. It does exist, even if it doesn’t make sense in his head.

I’ve read the biographies of musicians like Beethoven and Brahms, and they were obviously what today we would have diagnosed as bipolar, schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill. Music offers people some grasp of reality — maybe it is sanity.

We can express things and create from our innermost soul, whether we are mentally ill or not. So what I’m looking for is a way to remove the stigma of mental illness and homelessness, and show that this music unifies us. The creative impulse that we all have unifies us.

How did you first fall in love with the violin?

Growing up, there was always music in my house. My parents are very musical. They’re Bengali, and they would always tell me Bengal was the land of poets and artists and musicians.

When I was three or four, I guess I would always be dancing around and singing, so they took me to a local music teacher. I was going to play either the piano or the violin. I saw the piano and I started bawling. It was this giant, stationary thing, and I wanted to dance around while I played music, apparently. So I started playing the violin through the Suzuki program. I’d listen to music all day long, then have a medium to play it, and I was thrilled by that.

So we just kept on going. After two years, the local Suzuki teacher said, “I can’t teach him anything anymore. Take him to this teacher in New York City.” So we went to a Julliard pre-college prep school, called School for Strings. I started there, and my little brother, who played piano, and I started there. From there, we went to Julliard pre-college.

Was it a challenge for your parents to dedicate so much to your musical education?

My parents are not musicians, but they were incredibly devoted. My mother would sit in the lessons with me, and she would practice with me. When she found that I was talented, and this was something that was essential for me — that I really loved it — she quit her job and would take us all over the world so we could perform.

My parents had monumental battles with the school district that I grew up in. When I came back from my debut in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic, my school district didn’t let me take midterms or finals, and failed me. I was growing up in an Indian household — there was no way my parents were going to let me slack off on real studies. I was doing work for the next grade at the time.

So they pulled me out of the school district. The district then sent Social Services knocking at the door to take my brother and me away. So they put me back in school after skipping one grade, and I kept getting beaten up, because I was so young. We changed schools and the same thing kept happening. So we got out of the school district. I took my SATs when I was 11, I took a high school equivalency exam, and I started college when I was 13. They homeschooled my brother, and he started college at the same time.

We wanted to keep playing, but also get a real education that we could count on college credit-wise, so we’d end up with a degree. So if anything happened — if we had some kind of injury or the career didn’t work out, we’d have something on the side.

I started a second undergraduate at Manhattan School of Music, and worked on two undergrad degrees at once. Mount St. Mary’s College, where I was doing my pre-med degree, is in Upstate New York, and Manhattan School of Music is in Harlem. So my mother was driving me back and forth three times a week, 65 miles one way, and my brother to Julliard on Saturdays.

After two years of that she collapsed. She had three non-malignant tumors in her uterus because of the stress. It couldn’t happen anymore. That’s when my parents sat me down and said, “You have a choice. And you’re going to become a doctor.” I was devastated. But I transferred to a different college, and I got my internships, and I started to see that biology was something I really loved.

But I didn’t play for a year and a half. And that was very tough for me. After I spoke with Gottfried Schlaug, though, I decided I had to go back to music. So I went to Yale for my master’s.

A year and a half without playing? Many musicians might not have recovered from that long of a hiatus.

In fact, that time away shattered my confidence. I had to reteach myself every tiny technical detail. But I’m so grateful for that now, because I’ve redefined what works for me on the instrument.

I feel like I generated a real love and passion for the music when I took that time away. I started listening to other types of music. It was the first time I’d listened to Led Zeppelin. I found what I love about music, period.

And I’m still learning new things I love about music. At my first TED in 2010 there was also a ukulele player, Jake Shimabukuro. We had a late-night thing where we started jamming. I had never jammed before. I was scared stiff. And Jake was like, “Just let it go, man.” I had just never thought that way. I have to, you know, look at a page and learn everything I play, and memorize all the notes. It’s never off the cuff. So that was a freeing experience, and I want to do more of that.

Walid Al-Saqaf developed alkasir, software to circumvent Internet censorship. In this interview, Walid tells us why he’s vowed never to succumb to authoritarian regimes. >>>

Walid asks:

Can Internet censorship of any particular content be justified under certain circumstances? Explain.

Click here to respond on Facebook now! Or join Walid’s live Q&A on TED ConversationsAugust 5, 1pm to 2pm Eastern.

How did your journey in resisting censorship begin?

I come from Yemen, and in 2007 I developed a website called YemenPortal.net. This website is a news aggregator similar to, but of course much smaller in scale than, Google News. It handles several news websites on Yemen, bringing in content from government, opposition, independent news websites, blogs, videos, you name it — all having to do with Yemen.

I come from a journalistic background, and I also hold a degree in computer engineering, so I thought maybe I could merge the two together, and build a website that dynamically collects, aggregates and sorts information on Yemen. I thought of it as a contribution to my own country, and as a means to get my Master’s degree. Within a short time, the website had thousands of readers because it was something that no one had done before for Yemen.

I had ambitions that YemenPortal.net would be something of importance in the future. Unfortunately, in 2008 the Yemeni government became disgruntled because I did not filter out strongly worded opposition articles from certain websites. These websites were mostly hosted abroad, so the owners weren’t really persecuted — their websites were just blocked inside Yemen.

If you go to my website, you can see summaries of articles from other websites. People would click on the article links from my website, and go nowhere, because the articles are blocked. However, I still thought it was important for everyone to know what other websites are talking about. My idea was to ensure that everyone is represented. I didn’t want to act like the government does, filtering some viewpoints, while allowing others to be read.

Eventually my website itself got banned by the government. In trying to help others’ voices be heard, my own site was silenced. I realized I needed to investigate circumventing censorship, because if I couldn’t help myself, no one would help me.

That was when my journey in resisting censorship started. I fell first as a victim, but then I became an advocate for freedom of expression online.

That led to you developing alkasir, your software to circumvent censorship. How does it work?

Alkasir, which is an Arabic word meaning “the circumventor,” is a series of applications to help people access censored websites in their country. Alkasir started as a plugin for Firefox and Mozilla, developed into a web-based proxy on my own website, and then developed into another application as a pilot version, alkasir 1.1. I later developed 1.2 which is a much more advanced version of it. I have about 30,000 users worldwide — compared to many circumvention solutions, it’s not many — but it’s pretty substantial number. I have users in over 70 countries.

One idea that I developed within my work is a special unique method that I call “split tunneling.” Split tunneling is basically minimizing the use of bandwidth — it is only invoked when needed. For example, let’s say you’re in China, and you have 1,000 used websites. And among those 1,000 websites, there are three that are blocked. Alkasir sees if the website you’re trying to access is among the blocked websites, then it activates the tunnel. You go through the tunnel dynamically without noticing that there’s something different. If it’s an unblocked website, it goes through the regular channels. In this way it’s different than the available circumvention solutions that tunnel either everything or nothing. People often complain circumvention solutions deplete bandwidth resources. Because of split tunneling, I can serve the same amount of people with maybe 1 percent the bandwidth resources others would need.

Walid frequently uses multiple computers working in different operating systems as he develops alkasir.

You developed alkasir to help your readers reach your website. Is that still your main objective?

My PhD research here at the University of Orebro, Sweden, has opened my eyes to a whole new world of censorship on the Internet. It made me realize there are millions of users deprived of certain content. They only see part of the picture, so they don’t have a real sense of the reality of what exists on the Internet. So my intention, apart from helping myself and helping my readers, became helping other websites have their readers reach their content.

There are many who have used alkasir to not only circumvent censorship, but also to understand what they are missing. That’s another objective of this program. Even if you don’t access it, you still have this piece of information letting you get a sense of what else is out there.

Apart from serving users for free — it’s a free program — I’m also emphasizing the need for people to understand that you should act to be informed of these ill doings and censorship, and possibly use this information to campaign for freedom of expression in your own country.

The alkasir project is also a means of research and understanding the phenomenon of censorship. You can go to the website alkasir.com and find the map section, where it maps out what has been detected as blocked, or potentially blocked (it’s not a perfect system: it’s still under development). Our users have been instrumental in helping us map blocked websites. It’s perhaps one of the most comprehensive methods of analyzing censorship worldwide.

Walid, at Google headquarters, where he was invited to discuss his work in tracking and researching Internet censorship.

How do you hope to grow alkasir in the future?

Among my future plans are introducing a cross-platform solution, because right now it’s only for Windows users. In the future I plan to deploy Mac and Linux programs as well as to empower those with needs of voice-over IP programs like Microsoft messenger and Skype. So far alkasir is only for websites, but it can be expanded to included VOIP and other protocols that are blocked.

Have the revolutions in the Middle East revealed any interesting new findings?

Oh yes, certainly. For one, I never expected Egyptians to use my program. It’s always been known that Egypt was open and people wouldn’t need the program.

But suddenly, after the Arab Spring started and the revolution escalated, I realized that Facebook and Twitter were blocked in Egypt. That’s when it prompted a huge demand for a circumvention program in Egypt, and not many people knew about alkasir. I sent in a few links here and there, trying to help people, sometimes using Twitter, to help them understand there are different solutions, and that alkasir is one of them. During critical moments of this ban, the program helped enormously, according to certain people who were on the ground.

Now the biggest chunk of users is in Syria. I have lots of users there right now reporting to me on development issues, debugging concerns, etc., helping accelerate the pace of alkasir’s use there. They work with me to ensure that it’s reliable enough to withstand new methods of censorship that the government makes.

There are occasions when the website alkasir.com is blocked. When you can’t get downloads and updates through the website, the only way to do it is through email. So I send critical updates to people in Syria through a mailing list that people sign up for. People can send an email to get@alkasir.com and then they automatically receive the new updates. This way, they can update their program and will be able to connect once more. It’s a cat-and-mouse game.

In her recent TEDtalk, your sister talks about both the problems of Yemen, as well as a side of the country we don’t normally hear about in the news. What do you think of the current situation in Yemen?

We still have hope for change. The young people who have stayed in open-air arenas for over six months now, rallying for government change, are very determined.

However, increasingly there have been new means of oppression that have been introduced. One method that has been really hurtful in Yemen is the use of economy. The government has suspended salaries of anyone known to have been in any of those rallies. It is also inducing power outages, water shortages, fuel shortages, and others.

As protestors, you can’t do much about that. Yet the government has been blaming the protestors for this. It’s trying to pressure the revolutionaries by inflicting harm on the general public, and blaming those protestors. It’s a dirty and ruthless tactic, but dictators will do anything in their power to maintain their control. I have hope that change will happen, but it may be at a higher cost than we had all hoped for.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Focus on helping others before helping yourself. That’s what’s rewarding in the long run.

I had occasions where I was invited to form a company, and turn alkasir into a commercial product. However, I felt that my obligation to helping people get the product was more important than my own commercial success. Not that commercial success is a bad thing, however.

I feel that focusing on helping improve services for others directly, and ensuring that you’re not tied to any commercial aspirations, yields unexpected benefits.

Do you worry about the risk your work poses to you and your family?

There’s always this risk, but life is full of risks. Luckily we are here in Sweden, a country that protects freedom, and is in fact a haven for all those working on areas of freedom of expression.

I feel that no matter what happens, right now, I’m already in the midst of this, so I can’t back down even if a particular incident happens. That’s the way authoritarian governments work. They try to frighten people by presenting threats that they think would deter activists. But if we ever do back down, then we are sending the message: “Ok, that’s the way to stop us. The more you oppress us, the less likely we are to continue.” That sends the wrong message, and that’s what we as activists have pledged never to do. We’ll never back down because of pressure or because of threats.

That’s a heavy burden to bear. Do you ever get discouraged?

Sometimes you have let downs, and you become frustrated by not much happening around you. But the TED Fellowship, in fact, motivated me on a personal level to keep fighting the fight.

When you get recognition of this nature, and are noticed, and people understand what you’re doing … it’s as if they are saying, “Go and do what you are doing, and we are applauding you and will help you out in whatever way we can.” That is of major importance and value to us activists. We want people to understand that what we’re doing is not bad. It’s not a threat to every government, though it can be a threat to certain governments. But they know why they are being threatened — because they are not respecting basic human rights.

We’re also ensuring that no matter where you live in the world, whether it’s a developing country or a developed country, you still have the same rights. TED was an opportunity to say, “Even though we come from developing countries, where there is much lower Internet penetration, people are eager to access information and to have their voices heard.”

In her public art pieces, Candy Chang uses low-tech tools such as chalk, Post-it notes, and stickers to help people make their cities more user-friendly. We sat down with Candy to ask her more …

Candy asks:

If you could ask one question to all of your neighbors, what would you ask?

Click here to respond on Facebook now! Or join Candy’s live Q&A on TED Conversations, Monday, August 1, 3pm-4:30pm Eastern, at http://on.ted.com/ChangQA.

You have so many public art projects going on. What are you working on right now?

Well, my Civic Center colleagues and I just launched Neighborland. It’s a tool to help residents shape future businesses and services in their neighborhoods. It developed from a public art project I did called “ I Wish This Was,” which was inspired by vacant storefronts. Everybody passes by vacant storefronts and has ideas for what they’d like in them. My neighborhood in New Orleans, for example, doesn’t have a full-service grocery store. What if we actually had some power to influence the kinds of businesses that enter our neighborhood?

I created fill-in-the-blank stickers that say “I Wish This Was _____” and posted them on vacant storefronts. People wrote things like “a butcher shop,” “a community garden,” and “a taco stand.” It was kind of a lovechild between urban planning and street art. But there’s only so much you can do on a sticker. Some people wrote on each other’s stickers with things like “me too” and “3 votes for that.”

Some of these conversations needed to move to a more constructive space. So we developed the website Neighborland. It will hopefully connect residents who want things with likeminded people, initiatives, and resources. It’s a valuable poll for civic leaders and developers to assess what residents want in different areas. And it promotes entrepreneurship by revealing neighborhood demands and proving there’s a viable customer base for new businesses to open.

As a complement to Neighborland, we’re also developing a public art project called How to Start a Business. Starting a business can be an intimidating process. I’ve done it, and I’ve been totally confused. How do you push people to the next step? How do you make starting a business easier? We’d like to clarify the process and present the information directly on vacant storefronts in New Orleans. We’re still figuring out the details –maybe giant posters will cover the entire storefront — but we’ll also illustrate the process online and invite people to share their experiences. Hopefully this will help more of us turn our dreams into a reality, and tap the entrepreneurial power of New Orleans.

Where do your projects come from?

I think my background in street art, design, and urban planning have shaped a lot of what I like to do. I’m passionate about redefining the ways we use public space to share information that can help improve our neighborhoods. And I’m more and more interested in ways we can share information in public space to improve our personal well-being, too. Thanks to the Alaska Design Forum, I recently made a public art project in Alaska called Looking for Love Again.

Looking for Love Again, an interactive public installation on a vacant high-rise in Fairbanks, Alaska. Giant sign and chalkboards, April 2011.

I turned a vacant high-rise in Fairbanks into an emotional beacon pleading for love, and inviting people to write on chalkboards at the base of the building. One chalkboard was pragmatic, asking people what hopes they have for the space. And the other chalkboard was more emotional, asking people what memories they have with the building. People shared really touching stories. It became a wonderful glimpse into the history of the area and the emotional impact a building can have on our lives.

Thanks to Flux Aura and the Artist as Neighbor program, I just created a project called Career Path in Turku, Finland. I used temporary spray-chalk to stencil a university path with fill-in-the-blank spaces that say “When I was little I wanted to be ______. Today I want to be ______.” People can use chalk to write directly on the pavement and think about their larger life choices, and also learn about the lives and goals of the people around them. It’s about comparing yourself today to when you were young and thinking about the desires you had as a child when money was no object. Some of my favorite responses are “When I was little I wanted to be a princess. Today I want to be an electrician.” “When I was little I wanted to be a bird. Today I want to be a speech therapist.” “When I was little I wanted to be a grown-up. Today I want to be a kid.”

Career Path, an interactive public installation on a university path in Turku, Finland. Stencils and temporary spray-chalk, June-July 2011.

I’m also working on expanding my Before I Die project. A few months ago, I painted the side of an abandoned house in my neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with a grid of the sentence, “Before I die I want to ______.” It’s about remembering what’s important to you and learning about the hopes and aspirations of your neighbors.

I’ve been blown away by the responses on the wall, and the response to the project. I’ve received hundreds of requests from people around the world who’d like to make a Before I Die wall in their city. So we’re working on creating a kit with a one-column stencil and a how-to guide to make it easier for people to reproduce the wall in their community. We’re also working on limited-edition paintings, a book, and more installations. I just made mini Before I Die walls with students in Kazakhstan, and the next place my Civic Center colleagues and I will be installing is out West in the desert of America later this year.

Don’t you have problems with people abusing the space you open up for comments?

Yeah, that’s the most common pushback I get on these projects when I try to get permission from community groups. They’re often afraid that it might draw lewd comments. I always assure them I’ll monitor it every day. We do get some inappropriate comments, but really much fewer than anybody expects. To me, it’s worth a few penis doodles if that means there’s that much more constructive input from the community. All of these projects are experiments, full of unknowns. But it’s a shame if the fear of graffiti trumps the desire for more constructive community input.

Though a lot of your pieces have technological components, you’ve said you really value a strong analogue base. Why?

I started using analogue tools because it was what I could do, as one person, with the skills I had. And then I realized there’s another benefit to low-tech projects that I didn’t even think about at first: it is so accessible to everybody. There’s no barrier to entry. I don’t think you would have seen all these responses to I Wish This Was, Career Path, Before I Die, or Looking for Love Again if the platforms were only online. And what happens to all those voices that never make it online?

When you say, “This is what the community wants” it’s usually the four or five loudest people, or the 10 people who can make it to the community meeting. So how do you make the discussion more reflective of what the community actually wants? A low-tech format makes it easy for all residents to chime in.

What has inspired you to make the leap from your corporate job in Finland to doing experimental public art full-time in New Orleans?

I’d worked here in New Orleans the summer of 2006 on a criminal justice project, Million Dollar Blocks. Like so many other people, I fell in love with the city, and thought that I’d like to live here some day.

I was living in Helsinki last year, working for Nokia as a design researcher. Within the course of a few months a lot of personal tragedy happened to me and a few of my friends. One of my friends lost his father. Another friend lost his young son. I lost someone who was like my second mother. It made me really aware that life is brief and tender and not to be delayed. It made me think hard about what I really wanted to do in my life, about what was really important to me. This was part of the inspiration for the Before I Die project.

I loved working with these people in Finland, and they taught me so much. But I realized my heart was in public space, and experimenting in different ways to make cities better. So that’s when I decided to move to New Orleans to work in public art full-time.

I think I’m hooked on palm trees now. That was actually one of my childhood dreams: to live somewhere with palm trees. And now I’m finally doing it.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Write the bio that you want, and keep checking on it. On my website, one of the pages I edit the most is my bio page. That’s really for myself. I think it’s a good exercise to write about yourself: your accomplishments, your aspirations, and what is really important to you. I think it’s a great foundation to work off of and continue to tinker with over the years.

I think most of the things that I’ve done for the last five years have come from taking advantage of unexpected opportunities. My written bio helps confirm or challenge these moves, the things I’m doing, or thinking of doing. It keeps me thinking about how I’m spending my short time in the world, and if it’s fulfilling.

How was your TEDGlobal 2011 experience as a Senior Fellow?

TEDGlobal 2011 was intense and inspiring and I will simmer on a lot of ideas churned up from the event for a long time. It’s also become a lovely reunion with the TED Senior Fellows and an exciting romp with the new fellows. I’m so grateful to be a part of the TED Fellows family. It gets bigger, brighter, and bad-asser every time. And I’ve definitely made friends for life. It’s not just because the Fellows are all doing amazing things. It’s also because of their attitude. We bounce ideas off each other, but we also get our dance on!

I think it’s great to be connected to people who are doing very different things from you. I think it’s quite easy to bury yourself in a niche discipline. Just being in closer touch with them is a good reminder of how often we can overlap. Because of all the tweets, Facebook posts and blogs, they’re part of my daily headspace. And there’s a lot of inspiration there.

Besides the TED Fellows, what other interdisciplinary thinkers have inspired your work?

I’m mesmerized by people like Joseph Paxton. He was a gardener in the 1800s and he was the first person in England to grow the giant water lily plant. It grows to something like six feet in diameter. It has a special cross-ribbed structure that gives it a rigid form, and this made Joseph wonder how strong it really was. So he put his kid on it! He put his kid on a lily pad … and it still floated. And he didn’t stop there. He somehow found other people’s children and put them on the lily pad, too. He found out it could support a whopping five or six kids, and that made him wonder if the structure could be applied to other things. So he used the same pattern to make experimental greenhouses. And then he made the Crystal Palace, this gigantic cast iron and glass building in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

So he translated the ribbing structure of the giant water lily plant to an enormous building. And I love this story because it’s inspiring to see how open-minded he was, to think, “Hey, that leaf would make a great building.” I really like that a gardener can be an architect. Which makes me think about the idea of disciplines. I think we can make disciplines as big or as small as we like. There are lots of spaces between traditional disciplines and no one says you can’t go outside the lines. So it seems only natural that we each make our own discipline out of the bits and pieces that we’re interested in.

Creator of CellBazaar, a virtual marketplace that can be accessed via mobile phone, Kamal Quadir is on to his next mobile phone-based venture, bKash. This new company provides access to financial services through the mobile phone. Kamal divides his time between homes in America and Bangladesh, yet this nationally-recognized artist still squeezes in time to paint — sometimes while on an airplane home!

Are you a multidisciplinary mold-breaker?TED2012 Fellowship applications are now open! Apply here.

I wanted to take some time off after selling CellBazaar. But a week after selling CellBazaar, I took over this extremely exciting company, bKash. We launched nation-wide service of bKash yesterday.

“Bikash” in Bengali means “blooming” or “prosperity.” “Kash” sounds like “cash,” and “b” can stand for Bangladesh. bKash is about creating financial services for people in Bangladesh who don’t have access to banks. Bangladesh has a tremendous mobile network. It’s one of the best-networked countries in the world: 97 percent of the population has access to mobile phones. Yet only nine percent have access to conventional banking. bKash is trying to minimize that gap.

Cell phones are like mini-computers: you can maintain a bank account with a mobile phone. We have made a mobile phone-based financial service, which is safe, convenient, and easy to use. I have been helping to build the company since January 2008.

Did your CellBazaar experiences help prepare you for bKash?

At CellBazaar, I learned how to use mobile technology in effective ways, which is helping me tremendously at bKash.

There are many technological innovations taking place all over the world that could improve lives in Bangladesh in many ways. The challenge is finding the right technology and communicating that to 160 million people. Most of them do not have access to the Internet or regular media, and do not read English. Sixty percent of the population doesn’t have access to electricity. How do you include them in the technological possibilities? It’s a fascinating challenge to work on.

With CellBazaar, we approached this problem by making a virtual marketplace, accessible via the cell phone, so even a farmer in a remote corner of the country can easily and efficiently sell his bag of potatoes. The technology itself is a small piece of the puzzle. Figuring out its execution and limitations is the key.

A farmer uses CellBazaar to post his items.

What’s your philosophy for striking at poverty?

The beginning of saving is the ending of poverty.

The reason is that, when you save a dollar, when you say, “I won’t die today if I set aside some of today’s resource for a future day,” then you belong to a different category, because you are planning and making a provision for your future.

Let me give an example to elaborate this issue. When Bangladeshi women who work, say, in a textile factory receive their salaries, one of their concerns is where to save it. They don’t have a place to save. They often give it to their husbands, brothers, or fathers for safekeeping. Even though she’s the one who earned it, she’s not fully empowered with the money she earned. bKash is a tool that can help these women become fully empowered, because it allows people to have digital accounts if they have mobile phones.

Today, Bangladesh has a good-sized middle class. If you look at some of the social indices, it’s one of the healthiest countries among the developing countries. The abject poverty where people are starving does not exist in Bangladesh anymore to a large extent. So the poverty we are addressing is a level above that. We believe we’ve come to a place where if you apply technology, the country can actually take more people to the middle-income world.

A bKash user applies the technology to save and transfer funds over her mobile phone.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Every country, and every community, is very different. What I find is a good way of solving problems in Bangladesh or the US may not be applicable to somewhere else. So a social entrepreneur must figure out, “What is the competitive advantage we have here?”

I spoke of Bangladesh’s tremendous mobile network before. But Bangladesh has other competitive advantages. For example, how is Bangladesh able to feed the equivalent of half the US population, from land area that is the size of the state of Wisconsin? We have farms that can be harvested four times a year. Things grow very quickly. If you have a mango seed and plant it, in a few years you’ll have a mango tree growing mangoes.

In such a populous country, our biggest resource is our people. When I do a project here, a lot of people are always involved. When I did CellBazaar, I involved hundreds of people to educate millions of people on how to use the technology.

This time, with bKash, which is a joint venture of a US company Money in Motion and BRAC Bank, I am literally deploying thousands of people to teach millions of people how to use bKash. Why spend money on expensive newspaper or television ads that may not reach the target market very well? If I teach common people to go door-to-door to teach people how to use this mobile banking, it is not only creating jobs, it’s also giving people first-hand teaching of a new technology which really cannot be taught with those expensive ads.

So finding the advantage and capitalizing on it is the important thing. Think hard and find out, “Is this my competitive advantage?”

Why did you decide to move back to Bangladesh?

I am from Bangladesh. I was born in the year Bangladesh became independent. I have a very strong connection to Bangladesh. I moved to America in 1990, and now I go back to Cambridge, Massachusetts every three months or so.

I’m comfortable working in both places. But things are really happening here in Bangladesh. And I am motivated by working for social goals – making direct, visible improvements in people’s lives. Here, you can do a project that touches millions of people, and though it may only be one dollar per person, you create a million dollars of value.

What has the TED Fellowship meant to you?

The TED Fellowship gives a tremendous opportunity to meet people of your type of mindset, people who are engaging in your type of activities, from a common platform. It is very reassuring. It tells you that someone is encouraging you to do what you believe in doing, so continue doing it.

Your artwork is in the permanent collection at the Bangladesh National Museum. What is your favorite medium?

I did all my work on silkscreen during my senior year. I thought I would be an artist — and I still think I am an artist. I try to work quite regularly. But now given the time constraints, I prefer working with watercolors. With watercolor, you can think in your mind for a long time, and then execute the art piece in a relatively short period.

I try to use the natural flow of water. If I were painting a landscape of say, the pond in Central Park, and I saw the color on the paper moving a certain way, I try to maintain that. I don’t try to control too much. Once the natural shape takes place, I try to find the pond within that shape.

I’ll take watercolors with me when I’m traveling, sometimes even on the aircraft.

I hope my children will learn to paint. I would love to teach them when they get a bit older.

Genevieve von Petzinger’s database of prehistoric geometric shapes in cave art reveals some startling insights. More than mere doodles, the signs used across geological boundaries suggest there may have been a common iconography before people first moved out of Africa. When did people begin graphic communication, and what was its purpose? Genevieve studies these questions of our common heritage.

Are you a multidisciplinary mold-breaker?TED2012 Fellowship applications are now open! Apply here.

Congratulations on being one of the TEDGlobal 2011 Fellows! How is your first TED Conference going?

It’s been such a great time. The Fellows are all brilliant — that was kind of a given — but they’re also incredibly nice! They’re all so passionate and want to share. Typically when you’re dealing with brilliant people, they’re not always the most personable. But every single one of the Fellows is fantastic. My roommate, Bilge Demirkoz, works at CERN, and I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate. We get to talk particle physics at night, which makes me really happy, because that’s always been a fascination of mine.

I felt great about my talk on Monday during the Fellows’ pre-conference. We had time with a professional speaking coach, and I’m feeling really good going in to my main stage talk coming up on Friday.

And as for my work, Autodesk, one of the sponsors here, takes photographs and turns them into 3-D renderings. I’m chatting with them about possibly doing that for some of the interiors of cave art sites, with all the renderings of geometric signs in their places. I’m excited about possibly partnering with them on this project that could give people a virtual experience of being in the cave.

What got you into studying the geometric signs of cave art?

I knew I wanted to be an archeologist since I was a kid. In my last year as an undergrad, I took a class called Paleolithic Art. While I was sitting in the classroom, they were putting up all these beautiful images of animals: rock art in Europe that was done between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago. The animals are amazing — they’re huge, they’re done using perspective, color, and shading … you can see why the animals become the focus and the obsession.

What I kept noticing in the corners and around the edges of the photos, were these little geometric shapes. They were around the animals, on the animals, near the animals … but they were never centered in the photos.

Pech-Merle, a 25,000 year old cave in France with a panel of horses surrounded by non-figurative imagery. (Photo: B. Defois, Pech-Merle museum)

I thought, “What’s going on with these geometric shapes?” I thought it would be a good term paper for my fourth year. So I started looking for articles about them, and I couldn’t find anything. I asked my professor at the University of Victoria, “Am I not looking in the right places? ” And she said, “No, you’re not finding it because it’s never been done.”

We both laughed, and then I said, “Well, that sucks for a term paper.” And she said, “Yeah, but it would make a great grad project.” Funnily enough, I went back and did just that with her in grad school.

What were your goals with this research, and how did you go about conducting it?

When I began doing this, I wanted to know (a) how many shapes there were, and (b) discover if they were using the same shapes across space and time. I realized there wasn’t even a master list documenting how many shapes there were. I actually had to build that myself, creating my own typology as I went along.

I was looking at a 25,000-year time span, considered to be the Ice Age. I wondered if there was any patterning in how the signs were being used. Does it seem random? Are the shapes just little decorative markings, or do they symbolize something more?

It’s not that earlier researchers didn’t want to talk about geometric signs. They just didn’t know what to do with them, because to be able to make a comprehensive database and to search for this kind of patterning, you need technology. That’s what I was able to use: I architected a database for my master’s. I built it in just under four months, and filled it with my data from 150 sites. I went through different reports manually for each site – en français, I might add. These reports are not necessarily written to be fun and exciting.

I used France as the basis of my master’s work, mostly because the French have documented their sites so heavily. They have also spent millions of dollars to carbon date them. In places like Africa — where I swear there’s art that’s got to be in the same age range — the art is red, or it’s engraved, and we don’t know how to date those materials yet.

What made you conclude the symbols weren’t just doodles, tacked in and around the animal paintings?

The biggest clue was patterning. What is probably most convincing and what I’m starting to work on now, is that I found it’s not just that the individual signs are being repeated. We’re starting to see sign clusters in the later half of the Ice Age period (after about 20,000 years ago). They were actually putting them in an order — frequently pairings — of signs. During a preliminary study I did recently, I found that those groupings were replicated at different sites, including across a mountain range.

Perhaps this is due to cultural transmission. We do know people during this time had huge trade routes spanning thousands of kilometers. Or maybe it’s due to migration of the same people. Regardless, it’s really interesting to see how they used the art in a more systematic way.

The system is pretty faint when compared to later-day writing systems, or course. When I talk about things like graphic communication, I am using it in the broader sense. Basically what I’m saying is that the symbols appear to be meaningful to people who were creating them: they were making them on purpose, making choices. So if they were doing this — whether it’s a symbol representing an idea, a thought, a concept — it doesn’t really matter what it actually means, and honestly we have no clue. But what it does suggest is that somebody else could come along and would be able to understand it. This suggests there probably were agreed-upon meanings.

Niaux, a 12,000-13,000 year-old cave art site in France that contains a rare panel of geometric signs. (Photo: J. CLottes)

When it comes to these symbols, nothing appears everywhere. They were making choices about what to put and what to omit. Spirals are considered to be one of those basic universals that you always hear people talk about. They are one of the signs we see all over the world, right? But there are only two sites in all of France with spirals. They weren’t very popular yet in France during the Ice Age.

Another reason we don’t think the art was just doodling, is the amount of effort the people had to go to get the pigments they were using. Sometimes they were traveling up to 100 kilometers away from the cave site to collect the materials. They used mortars and pestles to grind up the pigments and mix them. There are also sites where they were using scaffolding. All of which suggests there was a fair amount of thought that went in to that site. They probably weren’t just hanging around there waiting for the bison to show up.

That said, while there are some areas of beautiful cave art that are very elaborate and seemed to require a lot of forethought and effort, other depictions are actually pretty bad. There is a whole variety of artistic ability being displayed.

In regards to doodling, there has actually been a lot of research on doodling. I was talking with a cognitive scientist who is studying MRIs of people as they doodle. Apparently doodling is culturally based. People only doodle things from their culture. So it’s unlikely they would accidentally tap into things they weren’t already familiar with.

On your website through the Bradshaw Foundation you talk about symbols you’ve recently added to your master list.

Yes, those are symbols from a pretty newly discovered cave. One of the symbols is an unciform — which is basically a hook shape.

The other is what I call a “W” shape.

At one site, I’d seen a mammoth where they engraved this “W” shape as the tusks for the mammoth. Just because we don’t understand what these symbols mean, doesn’t mean the people of that era didn’t. Maybe we just aren’t recognizing them because we don’t have the context. It’s interesting that the “W” shape appears in that exact form on a mammoth, and it also appears by itself elsewhere. Mostly it appears by itself. So there’s the question, “Are we seeing the development of iconography?” You don’t need to draw the whole animal, necessarily, once everybody’s agreed that the tusks are representative of the mammoth. Drawing a whole mammoth is slow. It might be pretty, but it’s not very efficient if you want to communicate something.

I actually spent the whole fall term at the linguistics department at my university learning about the origins of writing systems. I wanted to know, before you have a fully formed writing system, what stages does a given system go through first? What are the first glimmers that you see? How do you figure out if signs do seem meaningful?

You said we really don’t know what the symbols mean, or why these people made this art. Do you have any theories?

When it comes to rock art in general at that age, I don’t think there’s a grand unifying theory. I don’t think there’s just one reason why they were doing the art.

I have a feeling that it breaks down much more like art does for us. We have everything from high art to graffiti to performance art. All of that brings in other areas of art they likely had, but that we can’t get at now: music and dance and potentially other things. I don’t think the cave art was created in a vacuum. I think it was in all likelihood created within the larger culture that existed at this time.

If I had to take a guess, I would say the art had varied purposes. The way some imagery is so public, some is private, the varying levels of quality … It just feels like there might have been different reasons why they were doing it in different cases, just as there is for our art today.

What’s the most interesting fact you’ve discovered through your research?

Certainly the one that intrigues me is that when I started my research, the general feeling was that the geometric signs started out being very crude and simplistic at the beginning of that time period. This kind of goes back to that old idea of people thinking that this type of art originated in Europe. Or alternatively, that it was an independent invention – wherever you went in the world, people just came up with this idea of doing it. That certainly is possible, but it just doesn’t seem very likely, considering the amount of crossover between the symbols in different geographic areas.

As I was collecting data, I assumed that I’d find this progression from crude markings to more sophisticated art. During the process, because I was looking at each site in such detail, I really didn’t know what the overall trends would look like until I was finished. When I ran my database, I suddenly realized, “Oh my god, 70 percent of the signs were already being used from the beginning.” This doesn’t fit the theory of a simple, crude start, and then becoming more elaborate, with more signs being used later on. They’re there right from the start, and they have a very strong presence.

I’ve just finished a journal article where I go back “before the beginning.” It looks at symbolic behavior in Africa prior to humans migrating outward. They have now found portable objects in Africa that go back 100,000 years. They’re still pretty simple at this point but what’s fascinating is that all of it is geometric. There is no figurative art yet, which actually makes sense to me. Traditionally people thought that the animals came first, and the abstract signs came second, but it now looks like the abstract markings were the first type of expression.

We know that all humans originated in Africa, and that people probably started leaving around 50 to 60,000 years ago. People were doing rock art from the time they arrived in Australia, too, and they were there by 40,000 years ago. So the question is, was this something that was already part of the cognitive toolkit of modern humans, before they left Africa? Was it something they’d already invented?

Long-term, I want the whole of Eurasia in my database. I want to look at migration routes and start tracking it backwards to learn if there is a basic group of signs that people already had at the beginning of the Ice Age.

You’ve talked at schools, libraries and even at a federal penitentiary, and always seem to have such eager listeners. Why do you think your work connects with people? It doesn’t seem like it’s very relevant to our lives today.

Well, my goal going into the prison was to try to make them forget they were in prison for a little bit. Could I take them outside of that, and could we talk about something that belongs to all of us?

I think that’s what it is, for all the audiences: it’s our common heritage as human beings that really gets people excited.

When did we become who we are? When did we become human? We live in a very symbolically mediated universe. That type of behavior and abstract thinking is very unique to humans. When did that start? When did we tap into the potential? We had the bodies and we had the brains, but when did we start using it? When did we start coming up with things that are totally non-utilitarian, like music?

Genevieve sitting at the entrance to a cave in Southwest France.

We have 35,000 year-old flutes from the Ice Age. You can still play them. These things have absolutely no relevance to food, shelter, or heat. And yet, people were making them. So it’s an amazing glimpse into this entire mental world people had created for themselves — which is really what makes them us.

When you look at that time period, you see humans starting to move into all sorts of new regions and lanscapes. There was a lot of environmental change going on, and the things that got us through that were technological innovations. There was huge technological innovation going on at that point. We were inventing new tool types, inventing new ways to hunt, using group cooperation .… You know, we’re not the biggest, we’re not the strongest, but we work together. And communication — we communicate in a way that gives us so much strength and power when it comes to facing things we’ve never faced before.

One of the messages I always try to emphasize when I’m speaking with students is that you spend so many years reading books about people who have done cool things. It almost starts to feel like there’s nothing left to do. But there are lots of things that have never even been touched yet. Just keep your eyes and ears open. It can happen like it did for me: I wound up on the cover of New Scientist last year … and that was just for my Master’s research. Now here I am at TED!.

And for the record, I have to say, the penitentiary I went to — they were one of the best audiences I have ever had. They had the most intelligent questions. They were picking stuff up so fast, and were just completely engaged with the material .

You’re a big sci-fi fan. Like so many others, do you have any hypothesis about connections between extraterrestrials and early human art?

Well, I love astronomy. I’ve actually gotten to do the Drake equation, where you figure out how many planets per solar system, how many would have water … it’s a really cool equation. Considering the numbers, it just doesn’t make sense for there not to be intelligent life out there.

What I would say is that if there is intelligent life out there, I feel fairly certain that they are also using symbols of their own creation to communicate with each other.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

To fund my research, I’ve often had to put it on hold to work – always in totally unrelated fields, like international banking — in order to make money to keep funding my degrees. I now have some grants, which is great, but I think that this could be a useful perspective for social entrepreneurs to keep in mind: while it’s really great for social entrepreneurs to work on things like global health and climate change — things that are important, and may seem more on the ground and in the present — I think it is equally important to continue to expand our body of knowledge as a species. This is part of what makes us so strong. If people stop paying attention to the more theoretical or esoteric research, I believe this could end up costing us in the long run. I think that research is what helps drive us forward. So I might suggest that social entrepreneurs could expand their vision of what working for the “social good” might include.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-genevieve-von-petzinger/feed/4alanaherroGenevieve-von-Petzinger_TED_QAPech-Merle - panel of horses with signsNiaux - panel of geometricsGvP UnciformGvP W-signGvP at cave entrance in SW FranceFellows Friday with Meklit Haderohttp://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-meklit-hadero/
http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-meklit-hadero/#commentsFri, 08 Jul 2011 14:00:25 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=51003[…]]]>Meklit Hadero’s soulful songs have launched her explosive rise in the music world. Her sound draws from jazz, West Coast folk, and her Ethiopian roots. Meklit’s performances and community outreach projects — in North America, Africa, or where the winds take her — continue to enrich her music and be an integral part of its evolution.

Are you a multidisciplinary mold-breaker? TED2012 Fellowship applications are now open! Apply here.

Life on the road is a pretty constant thing these days. As we speak, I’m in Big Sur National Park after just having played by the seashore at Esalen Institute’s International Arts Festival. Next week, my band and I are heading eastward for a short tour called HOME FROM HOME from July 10-15. We’re playing at Johnny D’s in Boston, Real Art Ways in Hartford, the Festival International Nuits D’Afrique in Montreal, and Concerts on the Oval in Stuyvesant town in New York City. We’re playing music from my last album, as well as new songs written and learned on the East African road, and we’ll also be showing some beautiful footage from the filmmakers who were with us in Ethiopia. Can’t wait!

What have you been up to since becoming a TEDGlobal 2009 Fellow?

Lots! I finished recording my album “On a Day Like This,” literally two days before heading to TED Global in 2009. The album came out in April of 2010 and since then, my music has blossomed in quite a wonderful way. The album was really well received by the press in the States and internationally, and I’ve been touring and performing consistently since then.

At this very moment, I’m in a bit of a compositional place, and I just finished recording a duet album with an Oakland-based soul singer called Quinn Deveaux. I’m also in super prep mode getting ready to head into the studio with two members of the Arba Minch Collective: Gabriel Teodros and Ellias Fullmore (Burntface).

A month ago, the Arba Minch Collective just came back from its second trip to Ethiopia. We’re a group of North American artist-organizers from the Ethiopian diaspora, dedicated to making annual trips to Ethiopia to connect with traditional and contemporary artists there.

How was this year’s trip with the Collective different than last year’s?

Last year, we were traveling through the southern part of Ethiopia, and meeting with all kinds of Ethiopian anthropologists and cultural organizers. That trip was far more of an assessment, far more observational. And it was really about the cultures of the South of the country. This trip was much more about performing. We were in Ethiopia for 14 days and we played 10 shows. It was a really great experience for my band, that allowed us to grow as an ensemble. Having the collective perform in those circumstances — collaborating with the band as well as collaborating with local musicians — was just a wonderful experience.

We did everything from playing at an orphanage for HIV-positive kids, to playing clubs in Addis Ababa, to playing in outdoor venues that were a part of passing street life. We played free shows in the central square of Harrar and also the central square of Gondar, right at the feet of the ancient castles there. We played free shows as much as possible. We definitely learned just as much on this trip, though it was just very, very different.

How has the Arba Minch Collective grown from the trip?

It’s interesting, because we’re still defining ourselves as a collective. We’ve been around for about two and a half years now. It’s growing on both sides of the water. In March we had a retreat in Toronto, where there is a really strong core of organizers from the Ethiopian diaspora. The retreat allowed us to start connecting with organizers who are working outside of the arts. So that’s one hub that’s beginning to grow, on the North America side of things.

On the Ethiopia side, one big question that has come up for us is the role of the diaspora in Ethiopia. It can be a very controversial role. People emigrate to North America, and then they return to Ethiopia with resources. But often diaspora folks can drive prices up, and cause a host of changes, so it’s a complex relationship. What’s the responsible way of relating to what’s going on in Ethiopia?

Part of the reason we’re committed to going to Ethiopia every year or so is because things are changing so fast. It’s a challenge to have your relationship stay relevant. Every time we go, we see the infrastructure shifting so much, and the cultural life shifting at the same speed.

Right now there’s a real burgeoning in the arts and culture scene. In the 1980s, under Communism, there was a curfew put on the people, and they couldn’t go out at night. Musicians couldn’t play, so the music and cultural life started declining. At the same time, there was an influx of this very specific type of Russian synthesizer that flooded the market. So in recordings that come from that era, many traditional instruments got replaced with this highly synthesized sound.

Around the early 2000s, things really started to change, and now there’s a whole new cultural life blossoming. There are no more curfews, there’s a resurgence in playing traditional instruments in popular music, and there’s a growing base of venues for music and visual arts. Part of what we’re doing in the collective is really trying to connect to that upswing: to connect with those artists and movers and shakers there who are innovating, while really staying true to the roots of the culture.

We don’t really have any answers in terms of how we as diaspora relate to what development is. But what our real role is, is to go back as learners, to stay relevant, and to help these broader diaspora communities ask these questions and have these dialogues in public ways. Having the arts as a platform for that is helpful for openness, and it allows people to engage.

It seems you entered the art scene in 2004 and had overnight success. Were you part of the arts scene at all before that time?

I graduated from Yale with a political science degree in 2002 and I did all kinds of things after that. I worked for an economic development non-profit, for an acupuncturist, and when I landed in San Francisco, I worked for a foundation. It was 2004 before I started really stepping in to the arts. My first move into the world of music was taking singing lessons. They were a revelation.

I wrote my first song while on a trip to Japan with a roommate in 2005. I still remember it, though I’ll never sing it to anyone!

In a way, jumping in to music was such a surprise, because for every step I took towards music, music took 10 steps towards me. Things really did start happening right away. I don’t fully understand how or why it has been such a bright road, but I am deeply grateful.

As a kid, I always wanted to be a singer. But I think with the arts, it’s tough because we don’t have real role models. When you look at public figures of artists, it’s either people who are hyper successful and seem completely untouchable — like rock stars — or we see artists who are really struggling, yet relatively self-absorbed and unengaged with the world around them. So there’s not a lot of middle ground in terms of what an engaged artist look like. What does an artist who is doing compelling work, but also living a compelling life in the world — impacting the world, and being impacted by it — look like? We don’t have a lot of role models for that.

When I moved to San Francisco, I started meeting people who were actually like that, and that’s when things took off for me. Your community helps so much to bring you along.

What has the TED Fellowship meant to you along this journey?

The biggest way it’s impacted my life has been through the networks of the Fellows themselves. The Fellows are amazing!

In a more general sense, TED is a huge inspiration in terms of reaching your own borders around where you think your work can go. Whenever I watch TED talks, whenever I connect with the Fellows who are doing all of this remarkable work around the world, it keeps me so sparked about what’s possible. That lifeline of fire is vitally important.

When does your next album come out?

My work on a lot of levels is about multiplicity. I’m basically in the middle of about four album projects which are all completely different. As I mentioned, I just finished recording an album with Oakland-based soul singer Quinn Deveaux. We’re starting on the mixing process this week. Exciting!

I’m also working on an album with two members of the Arba Minch collective: Gabriel Teodros and Ellias Fullmore, whose hip-hop name is Burntface. They’re both MCs, so we’re mostly writing with beats, but creating the beats with acoustic instruments as well as electronic samples. We’ve got one song from that project finished and we actually made a music video for it at the site of the ancient castles in Gondar, Ethiopia.

These two projects will come out simultaneously in January of 2012.

I have another album I’m working on with an ensemble called Nefasha Ayer. That’s a project that’s been around since 2007, so we already have a full body of music written. The songs are all about exploring the space of in between, about the way that we are most alive in our complexity — whether that comes from being born in one culture and raised in another, or the way that all human beings exist between multiple inner pillars.

That music was written with Todd Brown, the founder of the Red Poppy Art House. I was director of the Poppy with Todd for 2 and a half years, and I actually left that position 2 and a half years ago. We wrote that music while we were working together to build the Red Poppy as a physical home for those same ideas. That project will probably be out in late 2012.

Finally, I’m working on the songs for another solo album, which I probably won’t record until the end of summer 2012.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

You do what you want to do, by doing what you want to do. Meaning, you get the experience you need, by doing the work. So the important thing is to start doing the work.

The other thing is, when you have a big idea, sometimes if you really knew everything it would take to do it, you would never do it, because it’s always going to take more than you think. So there’s this aspect of really needing to just jump in. That also means you’re probably going to make a lot of mistakes. But you’ll be learning from them, and growing from them as well.

Finally, I’d say to do what you can to help others on their path. It really comes back to you. For me, running the Red Poppy Art House was really all about creating a space for artists from multiple cultures to find each other and flourish from the meeting, as well as to have a place that helps artists to actually live as artists. Through that work, I inadvertently found the musicians who have become my band, the fans that support my music, and the inspiration that comes from interacting with artists of so many disciplines.

With the success of your music career and all that entails, have you felt like you’ve had enough time to engage in your community outreach projects?

My life balance between art and community has shifted immensely, in a way that was quite surprising to me. I’m just away from San Francisco so much, so it’s hard to be the anchor for those types of projects there.

At the same time, I’ve been able to do that type of work in different capacities. Right before I left for Ethiopia, I was an artist-in-residence at New York University’s Institute for African American Affairs. The artist-in-residency program there is really about allowing the students to learn in a different way, directly from artists. Over the course of a month, we were engaging both creative work as well as the intellectual exploration of these questions of identity that I’m addressing in my music. I curated a panel series with the other artists-in-residence, including an event called the Tizita Chronicles, using the Ethiopian musical concept of Tizita to look at Collective Cultural Memory.

I was also able to curate an after-school series at Lincoln Center’s Atrium through their Meet the Artist Program. The series was all about presenting artists whose work was engaging in the ideas that we were looking at in the residency panel series at NYU. Our main participants were young people from the arts high schools and public schools in the area and these amazing students from the West Side YMCA.

So though I’ve been away from San Francisco, it’s been great to be able to take what I’ve learned here and do it on the road, too.

And I’m still involved in the Red Poppy Art House, though it’s grown a lot since I left. But for me, it’s still a huge source of inspiration, because the staff there and the artists that run the space continue to deepen their relationship to the neighborhood, as well as to broader and broader networks of artists. I find myself continuing to learn so much by how the Poppy operates within the Mission District of San Francisco. The Poppy is still the thing that connects my heart to the city in a very real way. Every time I come back, it’s my landing pad and still my home.
You often explore questions of identity in your music. Was there a particular moment in our life that crystalized the complexity of living between cultures?

When I was 21, I went to Ethiopia for the first time, with my mom. Just me and her. For my whole life until then, my mother was very, very clear about Ethiopia. She would always call it “back home,” almost never referring to the country by its name.

When we went to Ethiopia for the first time, upon landing, suddenly — almost instantaneously — when she would talk about the United States, she would say, “Oh, when we go back home….”

And it hit me like lightning. “Oh, there is no such thing.” Home is completely situational, defined by a constant sense of return. We change so fast without knowing it. Our ability to adjust and to be complex may be far below our conscious knowledge, but that’s what we live … that’s how we are. And that was the moment I really got it.

New York restaurants and grocers scramble to get their hands on fresh, local produce. So what could be better than veggies grown right in the city? On a rooftop in Brooklyn, Viraj Puri runs Gotham Greens, a hydroponic greenhouse that cultivates delicious, fresh produce — using a fraction of the water and space needed for conventional agriculture.

Are you a multidisciplinary mold-breaker? TED2012 Fellowship applications are now open! Apply here.

Gotham Greens was created in 2008 with a mission of providing New Yorkers with local, sustainable, premium quality produce year round. We grow everything, from seed to harvest, here in our 15,000 square foot hydroponic rooftop greenhouse.

There are a number of ways to farm responsibly and sustainably. Our methods have been selected based on our unique geographic location. We’re in an urban area with a dearth of arable land. But a largely underused resource that does exist is rooftop space. There are plenty of large, unshaded, unused rooftops in this city that may be well suited to some form of urban agriculture

We’ve selected Controlled Environment Agriculture — a combination of horticultural and engineering techniques — that lends itself well to the built environment. We grow our crops hydroponically without using soil. Plants don’t require soil, per se. They require sunlight, oxygen, CO2, water and nutrients. We provide all those things to the plants in the greenhouse, as well as add nutrients to the water, and everything the plant needs comes from that water.

Hydroponics is well suited for a rooftop: you don’t have to haul a lot of dirt up there, or compost, or constantly have to change your soil. And it uses about one-tenth the water of conventional agriculture. Hydroponics is very lightweight and modular.

Hydroponic farming is also very space efficient: our greenhouse can produce about 20 times what you could produce on land in the same amount of space.

Gotham Greens greenhouse facility in Brooklyn, NY.

Is it merely space efficiency that accounts for such drastically higher yields?

The space efficiency is a large part of it. But also, Controlled Environment Agriculture, as the name implies, allows us to control the environment in here as much as possible to create the optimal growing conditions for the plants. This allows for very high productivity and efficiency.

We have sensors all over the greenhouse, measuring temperature, light, humidity, CO2, oxygen … different things like that. A central computer control system adjusts the greenhouse based on the readings from the sensors. If it’s too hot, for example, vents and fans are deployed. If it’s too sunny, a shade curtain opens. When it rains the roof vents are instructed to close automatically.

With all this high-tech equipment, and all the energy it requires, is this really an economically viable project?

We believe so. The demand for our produce has been off the charts. Currently our products are available at retail stores in New York City: Whole Foods, D’Agostino, Eataly, and Fresh Direct, and soon at a number of restaurants across the city. We can’t even meet the demand, which is a nice problem to have.

Gotham Greens on store shelves in NYC.

We are dedicated to providing customers with the best quality, freshest produce possible. Our customers are very excited because not only is it fresh, local produce available year round, but it’s also a consistent and reliable yield. We’re largely insulated from extreme weather events, like unseasonably warm or cold temperatures, drought, hail, and frost, as well as pest outbreaks and disease outbreaks.

So we believe there’s a really compelling business opportunity to do this. Even in an unfavorable economic climate, we were able to raise the required capital.

As for energy use, we’ve made considerable effort to be as energy efficient as possible. We’ve sourced the most energy efficient equipment, such as pumps and fans, and we actually rely mostly on natural ventilation for cooling. We installed a solar energy system on the roof –- a 59-kilowatt array –- which feeds a part of the facilities’ electrical needs.

Solar panels share rooftop space with the Gotham Greens greenhouse.

We’ve also selected the most insulating materials one can in a greenhouse application. We have a cover here above our heads, a few feet below the ceiling, which acts as a thermal blanket when it is opened. We’re also going to be installing a radiant water heating system, because it’s a lot more efficient to heat through water than through air. The upfront costs are high, but we believe it’s going to save us energy in the long run.

The greenhouse also should help the host building, energy-wise, because it acts very much like a green roof that helps insulate, so the actual building should theoretically have lower cooling costs in the summer and lower heating costs in the winter.

Part of our investment came from NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research Development Authority) and they gave us money precisely to monitor and collect data to see what is the carbon impact and energy use of our product, compared to conventional methods, with all the embodied energy calculated. That includes the long-distance food transport, and fuel that might have to be used for a tractor, etc., to assess where the energy improvements really are. So part of this project is research and development to see if this is the most energy efficient way to do things.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

Assemble a good team of people, because people have different skill sets. In our case, we wanted to have people with the right technological know-how, people with the right financial know-how, both in terms of raising capital and managing finances and writing a business plan, getting things on paper. Here we’ve tried to assemble a team of people with different skill sets. I think we complement each other and bring different skills to the table.

So if I were to give advice to a social entrepreneur, I would say become a group of social entrepreneurs. Two or three heads are better than one.

You’ve said this form of farming addresses a number of other problems, as well.

A nice thing about farming like this, besides just promoting urban sustainability, is it helps address ecological and public health concerns surrounding conventional agriculture these days, which include everything from food safety — things like E. coli and Salmonella outbreaks — to long-distance food transport and high resource consumption.

Our products are pesticide-free and we eliminate all fertilizer and pesticide runoff, which is the largest cause of global water pollution. As I mentioned, we use about 10 times less water than conventional agriculture. That might seem counter-intuitive, because it’s a water-based form of agriculture, but we recycle that water. We capture the irrigation water, and then reuse it. However, when you’re in a field, the plant takes some of the water up, and then the rest returns to the ground water. Agriculture is responsible for most of the world’s fresh water withdrawal, as well.

We are a triple bottom line approach company. We care deeply about sustainability and the environment, but also about the people in the community. We supply produce each week to City Harvest, which is a large non-profit food rescue group that picks up food and distributes it to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. We employ people from the local community. We’ve created about 25 full-time jobs, so we’re very proud of that.

Eventually, as we expand our production, we hope to also be supplying produce in areas that have limited access to fresh produce. Increasingly we’re seeing that inner city urban areas that have limited access to fresh produce also have very high instances of diet-related illnesses, such as diabetes and obesity. That’s something that we’d like to start to address.

This is a commercial-scale project. It’s not a prototype, but we are starting modestly. We produce about 100 tons a year, which isn’t really that much in a huge city with 8 million people, so we’d like to eventually get to a point where we’re producing a meaningful quantity of food, getting a meaningful number of trucks off the road, and bringing people high-quality, fresh produce year-round. We want to continue increasing jobs in the community, and keeping money in the local economy.

How did you wind up farming on top of buildings in Brooklyn, New York?

My background is, broadly speaking, in the clean technology, renewable energy, and green building space. What I’m passionate about is “appropriate technologies.” That means coming up with infrastructure, technological, and development solutions that are appropriate for a given geographical, environmental, and cultural context. I don’t necessarily think that hydroponic greenhouses are ideal for every city. I do think it’s very well suited to New York City. We have a huge demand for fresh produce here, and very little of it is actually produced here.

In 2004 I helped develop a company that implemented green building and renewable energy installations in Ladakh, India. Ladakh is a high-altitude, remote, mountainous region in the Northwest of India that is extremely rich in solar energy potential. But the region is economically underdeveloped, and there’s not a lot of electricity produced there. Solar electricity systems are a very appropriate technology for that region as they can provide low-cost rural electrification that reduces air pollution and carbon emissions. The idea is to leapfrog from no technology to environmentally friendly technology by cutting out the ecologically damaging steps in between. That’s where I cut my teeth in project management and entrepreneurship in the green building/renewable energy/clean tech space.

I also spent some time in Malawi in East Africa working for a conservation group — again working on appropriate technology -– marketing and promoting fuel-efficient stoves. Malawi has one of the world’s highest deforestation rates, and the largest cause of that deforestation is people foraging in the woods for firewood for cooking. We promoted various fuel-efficient cook stove designs, which use a small fraction of the wood compared to a conventional stove or traditional three-stone fire use. Traditional stoves also created poor indoor air quality. We gathered together some unpatented designs from engineers and development groups around the world, and we trained local masons and metal workers to build these cook stoves. These masons and metal workers in turn sold the stoves in their shops to the community as a commercial product, with the goal of became more sustainable in the community.

Back in New York after a few years abroad, I joined an environmental engineering firm where I had my first exposure to hydroponic greenhouses. I’m not an engineer by academic background — I studied economics, international development and environmental studies. I began to develop a business plan to take hydroponic greenhouses –- a technologically robust and commercially-proven existing technology — and bring it into the urban environment on a commercial scale.

My professional goal is to, one step at a time, deploy creative technological solutions that are appropriate and viable for the geographical location and cultural context of a given region.

There are lots of sustainable, appropriate tech projects you could have undertaken here in New York. Why a hydroponic rooftop garden?

I suppose my interest in food combined with an interest in farming and clean technology. I also recognized that it’s a compelling business opportunity: these are high-value perishable products, there’s an increase in demand for local, sustainably produced food, and people caring about where their food comes from and how it’s produced.

It was recognizing this need, and also wanting to do something that’s never been done before. Our project is fairly innovative, and it seemed like a fun, challenging undertaking. It seemed kind of cool to be the first commercial-scale hydroponic rooftop greenhouse facility in the United States.

Also, I love to eat at nice restaurants. Hopefully if I can become a supplier to the top chefs in the city, they’ll be friendly and invite me to eat at their places. [Laughs]

What’s your favorite vegetable?

Tomatoes, although I guess that’s technically a fruit. I also love butterhead lettuce.

Butterhead lettuce growing in Gotham Greens greenhouse.

Does your produce have any taste, texture, or nutritional difference than conventionally grown produce?

I can’t speak for all hydroponic greenhouse growers but I believe ours may be better. It does tend to be a bit more tender, more delicate — mostly because it’s grown in a controlled environment and not outdoors. It’s not beaten up by the weather, so it’s not as hardy or as tough.

In our system, a lot of the control is on the growers to ensure plant health, flavor and nutrition. Arguably, if the grower’s doing a good job, the plants can actually be more nutritious and tastier than a conventional product, because you’re really coddling these plants providing them with their every need. You’re ensuring they receive the proper nutrition — the right levels of potassium, calcium, magnesium, etc., as well as the right amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, light levels, temperature, and so on.

What’s your grand vision for the project?

Assuming the facility does well, the idea is to definitely build more of them, here in New York City I hesitate to proclaim that this will be the future of farming, or that this will be the way we’re all going to produce food for the rest of our lives. That being said, I believe that this type of farming has a role to play, particularly in dense urban areas. This is the first of its kind facility in the United States.. We’ll see how it does. If it does well, we’ll build more of them. But with a city of eight million people, I don’t think that this is going to be the only form of farming for us.

But the goal is to produce a meaningful amount of food here. I’m not sure what that figure is. Maybe 1,000 tons, 10,000 tons …. Maybe it’s taking 200 trucks off the road each week. That’s 200 less trucks idling in the wholesale market in the Bronx, less congestion, less fossil fuel being used. It also means more job creation, keeping our dollars in the local economy. We already provide 25 jobs. If we could employ 250 people, I think that’s meaningful. Its ambitious, but we’ll take it take it one step at a time.

How has the TED Fellowship helped you along with your goals?

The TED Fellowship was amazing. It exposed me to an amazing group of people at the cutting edge of their fields. It was so inspiring and humbling going to the conference and hanging out with other Fellows from around the world doing really, really interesting work. That was a really impactful thing: being inspired and motivated.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-viraj-puri/feed/9alanaherroVirajPuri_TED_QAInside Gotham GreensIn storessolar panelsGotham Greens Logo June 6 2011 croppedButterhead OverheadFellows Friday with Jon Gosierhttp://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-jon-gosier/
http://blog.ted.com/fellows-friday-with-jon-gosier/#commentsFri, 24 Jun 2011 14:00:53 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=50745[…]]]>To help journalists and emergency responders, Jon Gosier is developing SwiftRiver, a platform that sorts massive amounts of web and SMS data for accuracy. With his Ugandan innovation hub Appfrica standing on its own two feet, Jon has moved back to the US. Co-Founder of metaLayer, a company that adds visual data to real world scenarios, Jon continues to translate meta-data into digestible pieces applicable to users’ lives.

Congratulations on winning the Knight News Challenge! What is your project that the award will be supporting?

Ushahidi’s open-source project, SwiftRiver, aims to help verify real-time information from the web, largely for journalists and disaster response teams. It’s critical for them to act and make decisions in the moment, collecting information from the public (from Twitter, email, SMS, blogs and news articles), and to sort it by accuracy or priority.

We’re trying to create algorithms that enable researchers and journalists to make sense of disparate pieces of data, to help verify that information on the fly — as opposed to in retrospect.

A huge portion of this is the computer science aspect. It’s all very heavy algorithmically, and so it requires lots of engineering talent. This can be a challenge for an open source project, but it’s a problem that the Ushahidi team handles through their community volunteers. The sacrifice is that things take longer to build that way.

For the first year I was working on SwiftRiver with just myself and my friend Matthew Griffiths, with a small budget to hire contractors. That went really well, and we were able to cobble together enough of a platform that people started to see where we were headed. But it wasn’t scaling fast enough to solve the problem in a way that was stable enough for people who wanted to use it. The funding from Knight helps us bring on new core engineering talent and data scientists, to help get things done faster.

How does SwiftRiver work, exactly?

I’m writing a white paper with Heather Ford, our new research scientist, explaining in technical detail what is called “Quantifiable Trust.” We’ll post it on Swiftly.org when it is complete.

But in short, people opt-in to using our platform to capture information in a given context or scenario. They’re aggregating massive amounts of information from the mobile and social web, and our platform adds context to that information as the user receives it. Because a lot of this data is being processed in the cloud, we have the benefit of having the global history of all our users, and all the content that they’re trying to capture from the public.

We use a number of techniques to enable the user to sort and prioritize information: location disambiguation, reputation monitoring, natural language processing, influence detection, and duplication filtering.

What do those techniques look like?

With location disambiguation, we look at the text, and we try to extract elements or clues that will tell us where the user was when they produced that content. If they mention a shop — let’s call it “Café Port-au-Prince” — we know that “Café Port-au-Prince” may exist in 20 places around the world. That eliminates a lot of other places it could be. Then we look at other clues: maybe a block name, a place name, or previous messages. We can bundle those together and say, “You’ve mentioned these place names, we can statistically narrow down the possibilities for a positive match.” The likelihood of your messages being about a specific “Café Port-au-Prince” in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, becomes more apparent.

It’s really just following clues in the language to try to deduce where the location might be. Because SMS doesn’t carry location data, this is a work-a-round. It’s only so accurate, but it’s often better than nothing.

With reputation monitoring, we look at the history of the person providing information. For example, maybe this person has contacted you in the past, or the person is a member of other communities and carries a great deal of authority there. In other words, just capturing the history of the content and the content’s producer to add a bit of historical context.

Influence detection helps users take the credibility they’ve created in one place, and take it with them to another. For example, Wikipedia editors, might want to carry their reputations with them when volunteering for an Ushahidi deployment. Our platform gives them the ability to carry that credibility around, so they’re not always starting from scratch.

There are a lot of tools out there that measure social influence. Marketers try to capture social influence to sell things. What we do differently is try to capture social influence — what I would call “social currency” — so that we can use it as the basis for an element in our verification algorithm.

We also use auto-categorization and tagging, which is looking at a message and extracting the uncommon keywords, so as to cluster messages that mention the same words.

The combination of all these different algorithms, with the help of input by the user, is what gives us the ability to use their definition of “accuracy” in a given context as the baseline of what to compare new real-time data to. This allows us to de-prioritize information that doesn’t fit their criteria of accurate.

SwiftRiver had a trial by fire after the 2010 Haiti earthquakes. Is the platform best suited for crisis situations?

I would say crisis situations are a relatively small target for the platform, although it’s Ushahidi’s primary focus. Swift is certainly useful for crisis and first-responders, but we’re also looking at newsrooms, research and data science. There are situations where brands and corporations might want to use something like this. So crisis response is just one element of a bigger picture of helping to make vetting any kind of information more efficient.

How has SwiftRiver been used so far?

There are quite a few case studies on our new website, Swiftly.org. But here’s a specific one: in April, during the Nigerian elections, there were four Ushahidi deployments in the country focused on the elections. And there was a group called NEAT (the Nigerian Election Aggregation Team) who wanted to mash-up information from all those Ushahidi deployments.

So we worked with them to aggregate data from all these different deployments, pass it through our platform, add different types of structure and context as meta-data — and then helped them pull it in to another Ushahidi deployment.

So in that case, the data structuring element of Swift, as well as the prioritization filters, were what they were interested in: the platform has many uses.

Before starting at Ushahidi, you moved to Uganda and started Appfrica and Hive Colab. Tell us about those projects.

Appfrica started in Uganda in 2008 with the mission to build local capacity to do high-tech work in East Africa. It’s self-funded and for-profit, which means we do a lot of client work. Although we’re for-profit, we take its profits and reinvest it into philanthropic initiatives like our innovation hub, Hive Colab.

Hive Colab is a place where East African technologists can go to cut their teeth, work together, share ideas, get feedback from more experienced developers and investors and people from NGOS, universities, and so on.

We call it a “hive” because it’s a place with lots of activity. We have workshops where they get together to come up with smaller ideas to solve problems, as opposed to big ones that require funding.

Now that you’ve moved to D.C., is Appfrica continuing to do well without you?

Absolutely! I would say it would be a failed project if I had to be there to make it work. So it’s really exciting to see things still progressing nicely. There’s such a great team on the ground.

Why did you decide to move back to the US?

I originally followed my girlfriend to Uganda. And then I followed her back to the States where we got married. I’m a slave to love. [Laughs]

But beyond that, I still self-fund most of the work that I do. To sustain that, I need to focus on the projects that can help support the rest. My new project metaLayer is a tech startup that requires me to be here in the US to focus on the customer base and market opportunities.

Has the TED Fellowship helped you with metaLayer and your other projects?

In fact, I was just at SupporTED Collaboratorium in Lousiana. It was really cool to see so many TEDsters and the SupporTED coaches taking a hands-on approach to help shape the Fellows’ projects. They are helping us find ourselves and find our way with our work.

You’ve said metaLayer “augments reality.” What do you mean by that?

Our mission statement at metaLayer is to add layers of context to the mobile and social web. So not just meta-data like we were doing with Swift, but also visual context. The easiest way to convey really complex data sets to people is through visuals. With metaLayer, we hope to create applications that help people see the unseen stories in information.

So let’s look at our first product, metaLens. I could open up a book and wave my phone, with the metaLens app, over the table of contents. The table of contents has the names of places and things. metaLens would overlay information on the screen. For instance, it might show you the Wikipedia article for some of those names. Or, if it’s a place, it would tell you how far from that location you are right now. Or maybe we might show you all the other books that reference similar names and places. It’s sort of like Google Goggles, but going a step beyond search. The idea is to add value to the content that’s being viewed at the time. This is a very passive experience, you just hold the phone up and see the world through a different lens. So that’s one product, which we hope to be able to demo at TED Global in July.

There’s a second product we’re developing, that seeks to help expose relevant information mined from your social graph. That means from across all your files, all your tweets, your address book, all the blogs you read, all the people you know on Facebook etc. It might be useful to have some of that information recommended back to you when you’re in a situation that requires it. Again, I’ll use a Google example: think AdSense but for your own useful information instead of ads.

Not everyone has the luxury of being a data scientist or having a background in information analysis. So the more we can present complex stories visually, I think the better off we’ll all be.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

If you have a good idea, the most important thing, if you want to be successful, is to execute on that idea, no matter how sparse your resources.

When I started Appfrica, I used my own savings. Although I thought it was a good idea — and people tell me it’s a great idea now — at the time, no one would support it. The only reason it was even moderately successful is because I did it anyway.

I can say that, all across the industry, most success stories come from perseverance and tenacity; not necessarily having all the right resources at the right time.

You have been working on a science fiction novel, I hear.

I was working on a science fiction novel called Muxtionary. I still am, but with so many different projects, I have to prioritize the ones that pay the bills and feed the family. I still write lots of fiction. I’ve never published anything. I do it because I love it.

Muxtionary looks at the future development of Africa, the convergence with technology, and how it’s all playing out. Some of that might be good, but some of that will be negative. It looks at subjects like pollution, over-population, automobile safety, self-replicating machines, bio-engineering …. What would that look like in a few years, when it all goes wrong and the developing world becomes the dumping ground for these things? That’s the theme for the book.

‘Mux’ is short for multiplexer which is a device that takes two different input signals and outputs them as a single result. So Muxtionary is mash-up of the word ‘Mux’ and ‘Missionary’ — those who traditionally go to developing countries to propagate religion. In this fictional world people go to evangelize technology in the same way.

Currently I’m writing a nonfiction book about some of the research I’ve done while working on SwiftRiver and Ushahidi. It’s about crowdsourcing and how many new technologies are successful because they augment the nascent relationships and connections between people. It’s an audiobook and podcast called Cult of the Crowd.

You used to be a music and film producer and audio engineer. What caused the shift?

I went to art school, Savannah College of Art and Design. I never thought I would be in the computer science field. The arts are where my heart is.

Sean Gourley analyzed real-time data from the Iraq war and discovered a precise mathematical model underlying it. Now he’s expanding on that research at Quid, his startup that maps trends in technology. Having unearthed such powerful information, Sean takes time to help kids understand the importance of math, even while he grapples with the eternal Frankenstein question.

It was a big undertaking to collect and analyze data for the size and timing of violent events in the Iraq war. What made you begin?

I was sitting down with James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. He was at a dinner at Oxford where I was a PhD student, and we were discussing the impending war in Iraq. It was one of those classic Oxford dinner conversations, where you sit around these high tables, Harry Potter-style, and you discuss the things of the world.

It was 2003 and the Iraq war was on everyone’s mind. I don’t want to say which side of the argument either of us was on, but the fact is we disagreed. We couldn’t reconcile our differences in any meaningful way because I could see his point of view, and he could see my point of view, but who was right? Without empirical data and a set of testable models, you could discuss your views all night without progressing any further. It seemed like there had to be a better way.

So I went and looked at what research was being done on the topic. The reality was there was very little being done in this space. Back in 2003 we were just getting the first blogs out of Iraq, with real-time information, with news media being published and accessible through the Internet. At that time there were also other mathematical models beginning to emerge, models that were starting to explain human behavior.

I had a hunch that there might be some mathematical pattern that might emerge once we’d looked inside Iraq. No one had ever looked inside a conflict as it was happening. No one had ever pulled apart individual attacks and no one had ever dissected these things in real time. That was the big challenge.

Why was it such a surprise to find the model you did?

It’s more that it was such a good fit. We had a hunch that there might be something. We were looking for a signal — but didn’t expect to be hit over the back of the head with it. We didn’t think it would have been that clean and that obvious.

That was the surprise — you just don’t expect that to come out of a war zone, much less a place like Iraq, where everyone was saying that it was one of the most chaotic places in the world. And yet it had this startling mathematical order beneath it. It was really just the cleanness of the mathematical signature that struck us.

You’ve found that this pattern can be seen in other situations … it applies to startups in Silicon Valley, for example.

Yes, that’s precisely it. What underlies the mathematical signature we see in Iraq is really part of a broader type of system — an asymmetric system. How is it, in the world we live in, that we get small groups start to emerge quite rapidly, and take on and often beat the incumbent players? That’s the case whether they are large companies, corporations, political movements, or indeed, military forces. How do you understand the mathematics that allows small things to win?

It’s sort of something that we think really shouldn’t be able to happen. You shouldn’t really be able to get a small group to take on a larger group. You shouldn’t have a small startup that can beat Microsoft. And yet from Silicon Valley to Iraq we see it happening time and again.

It’s something that can be used for good and for bad. In the innovation space, it’s really quite a positive thing. With political change, it can also be really positive. Potentially with insurgent groups and terrorism, it can be a very bad thing.

What is the connection between this mathematical model and your work at Quid?

The basic goal of Quid is to collect information about global systems in the world: everything from technology to conflict, to political unrest … and to structure this information in such a way that it can be stored and used to feed into different mathematical models. We can then put those models up into advanced visualizations to allow decision makers in governments, corporations, finance and the non-profit space to make their decisions about the global systems that are changing rapidly.

Quid allows us to ask the deep questions about global systems: What is it that drives technology forward? What is it that is going on in Northern Africa at the moment that allows the political movements to happen there? How do we get real time information out of those places? How do we process that? And how do we package that up in such a way that allows people to make better decisions around it?

So Quid for me is an extension of the work in realizing that the mathematics of war was one part of the broader global system that includes political, technological and social movements.

We’ve launched our first product to a limited group of customers. It’s in the technology vertical, and it’s being really well received. In the coming months, we’ll release the next vertical. There are some questions about what that’s going to be. We’re looking at the space around conflict for the next product that we put out.

What caused your shift from the world of academia to entrepreneurship?

After I gave my TED talk and published the results of the study in Nature, I had a time of reflection. When I looked at the scope of the work I was doing, I realized it was probably a hundred million dollar problem. In order to get our heads around understanding war and understanding epidemics and political movements and innovation and technology — the big global systems that govern the world we’re in — it was going to take a lot more money and a lot more people.

And for me, the idea of chasing tenure within the formal structure of a University department wasn’t quite right.

Quid for me is the extension of my research, but using a set of different resources to do it. With enough money from venture capital, I can bring together many very, very smart people. We have some of the top string theorists, engineers, neuroscientists and mathematicians. It’s a really interdisciplinary group of people coming together to help me solve these problems.

Sean presenting at Quid’s weekly all-hands meeting.

That’s kind of the point of Quid: to get the resources to build a team that will take my research to the next level. It is quite a nice model, and I wonder as we go forward in the next decade, if more and more scientists will take on the venture capital model to push their research forward. We’ll see.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizensblog.

What’s worked for me is having a sense of, and belief in, who I am and what I’m doing. That’s a foundation I always go back to. My naïve impression starting out was that the world will immediately get it and understand it. The reality is, if you’re really trying to do something new, most of the world won’t even care about it. Or, if they do care about it, they won’t really understand it. But over time and with persistence, it comes together.

The other bit of advice is just that if you are putting together a social entrepreneurship team, make sure you have the ability to tell your story and your vision, and the ability to get good people to come work with you on it. It’s so, so much about the team. As you get big enough, you can’t do it by yourself. Getting the right people together and getting them working together on the right problems is going to dictate how successful you are. That is the main learning for me.

Sean (far right) with Quid team at Quid’s 2011 Hack-a-thon.

Do you have any words of wisdom for kids in math and physics class who don’t think their classwork is relevant to the real world?

Whenever I go back to New Zealand I teach a few classes in physics or math. I teach about the role that mathematics has in the world that we live in today. I think it’s something that in high school you don’t really get exposed to.

In high school you go and learn 17th and 18th century mathematics. That’s the mathematics of understanding heavenly bodies: calculus, differentiation, integration. It’s not specifically the math of the world we live in today. The math of the world we live in today is much more like statistics.

People say the math of today is too complex for the kids to get their heads around. But I think that’s a fallacy. I think a lot of the math that is important today is just as easy or perhaps easier to understand than the 400 year old math that is currently taught, and what’s more — it is also incredibly relevant.

When I can sit down and spend a couple of hours with these kids, I think they come away with a sense that, “If I know math, I can understand the world and can do some powerful things within it. I never knew math was so important.” I think that’s the connection that’s missing.

You can look at things like, “How does Google return a search result to you?” That’s a set of mathematical equations based on network theory and an understanding of human behavior. “How does the stock market crash?” or “How do you do algorithmic trading on Wall Street?” “How does the Facebook news feed optimize which friend it shows you every day?” “How do viruses spread around the world?” Or, indeed, “How do wars start and what do they look like once they’re going?”

There are many different predictions about the future of warfare. What changes would have to occur to make your model obsolete?

That’s a really good question. I think if we saw a retrenchment back to state versus state warfare … if the US and China, God forbid, were to go to war, it’s not obvious that these mathematical models from Iraq would apply, because you’ve got two equally sized forces fighting. But as long as we’ve got the insurgent model, and the asymmetric dynamics, then I think we’re going to keep seeing these patterns.

What would be interesting would be to research, “To what extent can our understanding of insurgency transform regular warfare?” And, “If the US and China were to go to war, would there be an adoption of insurgent tactics? If so, what would that look like?”

The question about what we’ve uncovered is not so much, “Will it keep predicting the future of war?” But more so, now that we know this, “How will it change the future of war?”

Can the information you are producing be dangerous in the wrong hands?

Absolutely.

Understanding how to mount a successful insurgency is very powerful. And understanding how to defeat an insurgency is also very powerful. It walks into the Mary Shelley Frankenstein kind of argument: what is the moral role of the scientist? You create a monster; you create a panacea. Is it up to you, as the scientist, to control where it goes?

I think the idea is that it’s almost inevitable that someone’s going to figure this stuff out. Whether it was going to be my group and me, or maybe someone five years later, it’s going to exist. And it’s not really a question of “Should you try and keep it undercover?” Because you can’t hide it. It’s more a question of, “What do you do with it now that you know it?” That’s the important thing.

My belief is that there are people who will use it for bad, and there are people that will use it for good. But hopefully, there are more people that will use it for good in the world, so that on balance, it’s a good thing.

But that said, you do have to be very careful with who you work with and collaborate with.

What’s the connection between your work and your TED Fellowship?

It is understanding the power of stories. That was a big takeaway from the TED Fellows program. It is ultimately about telling stories — stories around ideas. At the TED Conference, you get exposed to that, and you see many, many different stories being told — and told by some of the best people, in some of the most creative ways.

I think as the complexity of the world that we live in increases, and it moves faster, two things become really apparent. One is: you need mathematics to understand it. And the second is, you need the power of stories to explain it. I always kind of had the mathematics. Getting the stories has allowed that loop to be completed. And at that point, you can actually start to make a difference.

How do stories enrich the work you do?

When I was going through Iraq, I was confronted by the people that were behind the data points. It’s one thing to have people as numbers on the spreadsheet, so to speak. It’s another thing to see them and hear their personal stories.

War is both of those things. It’s coldly mathematical, and it’s intensely emotional. I think you need to see both to really understand it.